India. Medical tourism

Description

India's booming private healthcare system is expected to be worth billions of dollars in the decades to come, as westerners flock to India to get healthy. Fed up with long lines and exorbitant fees at home, these patients can now fly to the subcontinent and go straight to the front of the line for cheap operations in newly built, hi-tech hospitals. Averill Dollery who lives in Worcestershire in the U.K.suffers from chronic pain; a pinched nerve in her back is destroying her quality of life. Averill can't get an operation to fix her back because the National Health Service considers that her weight problem would make the spinal surgery she requires too dangerous. But salvation is at hand - in the form of India's Doctor Prathap Reddy. Reddy is a cardiologist, a medical entrepreneur and the driving force behind the Apollo Hospital empire. All Averill has to do to get help is sign up, pay up and get on a plane to New Delhi. But for the many millions of Indians who live in abject poverty the health system barely functions. India's overstretched and under resourced public health system is failing its people. With the rapidly growing private sector catering to prosperous medical tourists, the health care of ordinary Indians is being neglected.

Runtime

24 min

Subjects

Geography

Genre

Date of Publication

2007

Database

Alexander Street

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