Abstract
As perhaps the most visible aspect of an increasingly global healthcare market, medical tourism would seem to epitomise the ‘consumer choice’ of free-market capitalism and everything that is seen to entail—namely, self-determination via freedom to decide treatments and travel, freedom of mobility, and the consumption of products and services that are ‘personalised’. In societies governed by neoliberal philosophies and policies, ‘freedom of choice’ has strong appeal, suggesting the absence of personal constraint or self-control over one’s circumstances and destiny. But what does ‘choice’ mean for patients and their carers in contexts where there are few or no clinically proven treatment options available to them, or where options that are presented are perceived as equally undesirable or unaffordable?
Oh well, I mean, to us it’s like there’s no other choice. Do you know what I mean? No, we don’t want to go. We don’t want to get on the plane. We don’t want to go and do it but there is no other choice.
(Eloise, mother of a child with autism who elected to travel to Mexico for a stem cell treatment)
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Petersen, A., Munsie, M., Tanner, C., MacGregor, C., Brophy, J. (2017). ‘Choice’, Hope, and Stem Cell Treatments. In: Stem Cell Tourism and the Political Economy of Hope. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47043-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47043-0_2
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