Medical Tourism: A History and Overview of the Industry and the Case Study of Addiction Recovery in Spain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on the emerging global market in medical tourism. The industry continues to expand and become increasingly profitable with greater popular support. This paper conveys the findings of a literature review on the origins, history and contemporary development of the industry. It explores the rationale and access of the medical tourist, and the purported benefits and costs to involved parties including patients, caregivers, citizens and governments. Ultimately it reveals that this phenomenon leads to lower costs, better care, discretion and leisure benefits to wealthy and mobile international clients while reducing available resources and quality of care for residents of host countries, which are mostly low and middle income countries and potentially costing source countries in aftercare. This paper examines the case study of international treatment for addiction in Spain and analyze two websites advertising the treatment for their use of promotional tactics, the importance of place and the relevance of Wilbert Gesler’s therapeutic landscape concept in marketing services. This reveals that international mobility allows businesses to profit from permissive legal environments and popular therapeutic landscapes abroad.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".