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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Healing Holidays & Retirement in Goa/India: Inequalities of Healthcare Home and Abroad

presenters

    Helmar Kurz

    Nationality: German

    Residence: Diverse

    University of Muenster / Germany

    Presence:Online

Medical Tourism has an ancient history when we think about spas and special treatments only available in other-than-home localities within one's country or to neighboring countries. It involves the translocal movement of patients, relatives, specialists, practices, and knowledge. In the second half of the 20th century the practice of medical tourism, or health travel, transformed. This transformation includes the "travel home" of migrants to receive treatment in their original environment or of people of poor countries but with some resources to more wealthy countries with better health resources. However, particularly in countries previously being referred to as "Third World Countries" or "Emerging Countries", Medical Tourism became a neoliberal and highly capitalist business model to attract people from "First World Countries" to receive treatment for "Third World Prices". New market models arose to promote Healing Holidays to combine the useful with the pleasant or evade long waiting lists, national laws, or ethical rules. This paper, with the example of India, will address health access inequalities resulting from the related privatization of care and the decline of charitable public health, particularly for local populations with low economic resources. However, it will also refer to health inequalities in medical tourist's home countries that force patients to travel to other countries, and, due to low economic resources, have them combine healing and holidays. The particular ethnographic example of a clinic in Goa/India provides a differentiated perspective due to a certain criticism of biomedicine and the integration of alternative healthcare models and approaches that patients miss in their home countries or that health insurance does not cover. It will be introduced as a Counter Clinic that resists Capitalist structures of Medical Tourism and the Hegemony of Biomedicine, but it will also be critically analyzed in terms of who of the local communities gain or lose something.

Keywords:

Medical Tourism; Health Travel; Transnationalism; CAM; Holistic Healing