Medical tourism industry: A systematic review on its principles, sequels, and ethical issues

Aim: This study was conducted in order to systematically collect existing articles and describe and analyze the different fields of medical tourism including the definitions of medical tourisms, motivations of medical tourists, marketing in medical tourism, and ethical issues in medical tourism and its impact on the health system.Methods: The current systematic review followed the principles of the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews” guideline. all manuscripts related to medical tourism were deeply searched by the two reviewers using the related keywords including “health tourism”, “medical tourism terms”, “stem-cell tourism”, “dental tourism”, “reproductive tourism” and “transplant tourism” in the international manuscript databases such as Web of knowledge, PubMed, Emerald, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar. Results: The findings show the same definition of medical tourism in various articles and motivations of medical tourists. However, there is a wide range of principles related to medical tourism in terms of benefits and its consequences in studies, so that most studies in developing countries reflect the benefits of medical tourism and most studies in advanced countries reflect the consequences of medical tourism. Conclusion: The subject of medical tourism is different according to the policies and programs of each country, and conducting accurate and comprehensive research in the country in order to clarify the reality of the issue is necessary.

کلیدواژه ها:

Medical tourism ، policies and programs ، Health tourism ، reproductive tourism