Medical travel: what it means, why it matters.

Markets for medical travel have grown immensely in the past few years. They have attracted the attention not only of healthcare consumers, providers, and payors but also of scholars from various disciplines. This editorial demonstrates some of the ways that anthropology can contribute to current efforts to better understand medical travel. Such contributions have more than important academic implications. Properly packaged, anthropological work on medical travel can be of great value to policymakers and program planners as they grapple with the changes that geographically and subjectively new patterns of healthcare procurement entail.