Global competition is emerging in the health care industry.  Wealthy patients from developing countries have long traveled to developed countries for high quality medical care.  Now, a growing number of less-affluent patients from developed countries are traveling to regions once characterized as “third world.”  These patients are seeking high quality medical care at affordable prices...

MORE than 70,000 Brits will have medical treatment ABROAD this year. “Health tourists” will book online and fly to India, Malaysia and Europe to avoid superbugs and waiting lists here.  Treatments include heart surgery and hip operations, figures revealed yesterday.

Seoul Metropolitan Government is considering building a foreign tourist-oriented medical complex.  The city announced that it is working to establish a medical-tourism complex in Seoul to attract foreign tourists by providing reasonably priced medical treatment, adding that a feasibility study was underway.

When Kevin Stewart's doctor told him late last year that he had advanced cirrhosis of the liver and would need a transplant or face certain death, Stewart never thought that his salvation existed half a world away in India.

On learning he needed heart surgery last spring, Larry Shaw's first question was: How much?  The surgeon's fee, between $1,500 and $2,000, was within Shaw's means as a self-insured businessman. But the angioplasty, including placement of a thin tube in a clogged artery, would require a one-night hospital stay...

Bruce Pearson, a 61-year-old plant nursery owner in Boynton Beach, Fla., was desperate for relief from excruciating back pain. Worried that his health insurance might not cover treatment, he searched the Web for options—finally choosing to have spinal stenosis surgery in Thailand. Pearson's total bill: $4,618.03 for services that would have cost him at least $14,000 out of pocket at home.

Men are facing similar pressures as women to look good and it is contributing to a rise in the numbers having cosmetic surgery, experts say.  The Men's Health Forum said advertising and the media were reinforcing the stereotypes that men needed to be athletic-looking and toned.

When David Woodman announced he was going to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for major dental work, his son Josef thought his dad had lost his mind. He had visions of untrained dentists burrowing into his father's mouth, clutching fistfuls of rusty needles.

So the younger Woodman tagged along, to make sure his father would not fall victim to foreign quackery. "Instead of what I feared, he got a board-trained dentist in a great clinic, with state-of-the-art instruments and panoramic X-rays, " says Woodman, who was so impressed he ended up researching and writing the new book Patients Beyond Borders on the phenomenon of medical tourism. "And he saved $11,000 on a mouthful of teeth. I came away with a different perspective. "

FINISHING my lunch at an open-air restaurant in downtown Bangkok, I felt slightly queasy. But by the time the taxi arrived back at my hotel, sweat was pouring out of my armpits, the folds of my stomach, even my shins, and my leg joints buckled as if a diamond-tipped drill was boring into them...

A national lobby group wants the Federal Government to help strengthen Australia's medical tourism industry.  The Australian Tourism Export Council says the sector is already operating on an ad hoc basis in various parts of the country.