The Intersection of Star Culture in America and International Medical Tourism


Book Description

Celebrity culture, health care, and travel attract attention in America’s media-saturated society. These worlds curiously intersect in the study of medical tourism. Although the US touts some of the finest and best-known medical facilities in the world, many jet-setting A-list celebrities, who can well afford the finest of health care, seek treatment far away from home, popularizing international sites, physicians, and procedures. These travelers, whose every move is chronicled by the media, both reflect and influence health care concerns in America. An analysis of these high-profile cases of celebrities with both life-threatening and non life-threatening conditions sheds light on the link between medical tourism and celebrity, showing how health care and entertainment intersect, and the American public responds. The Intersection of Star Culture in America and International Medical Tourism: Celebrity Treatment argues that celebrity cases and media content drive awareness of medical tourism among Americans at a time when the medical system is under intense scrutiny. By popularizing international sites for treatment, procedures not available in the US, and different approaches to patient care, media narratives present options for health care, triggering dialogue on one of America’s most important human welfare issues.




Global Issues 2022 Edition


Book Description

Written by award-winning CQ Researcher journalists, this collection of non-partisan reports offers an in-depth examination of today’s most pressing global issues.




Global Issues and Innovative Solutions in Healthcare, Culture, and the Environment


Book Description

Despite the development of environmental initiatives, healthcare, and cultural assimilation in today’s global market, significant problems in these areas remain throughout various regions of the world. As countries continue to transition into the modern age, areas across Asia and Africa have begun implementing modern solutions in order to benefit their individual societies and keep pace with the surrounding world. Significant research is needed in order to understand current issues that persist across the globe and what is being done to solve them. Global Issues and Innovative Solutions in Healthcare, Culture, and the Environment is an essential reference source that discusses worldwide conflicts within healthcare and environmental development as well as modern resolutions that are being implemented. Featuring research on topics such as health insurance reform, sanitation development, and cultural freedom, this book is ideally designed for researchers, policymakers, physicians, government officials, sociologists, environmentalists, anthropologists, academicians, practitioners, and students seeking coverage on global societal challenges in the modern age.




Strange Trips


Book Description

Drugs take strange journeys from the black market to the doctor's black bag. Changing marijuana laws in the United States and Canada, the opioid crisis, and the rising costs of pharmaceuticals have sharpened the public's awareness of drugs and their regulation. Government, industry, and the medical profession, however, have a mixed record when it comes to framing policies and generating knowledge to address drug use and misuse. In Strange Trips Lucas Richert investigates the myths, meanings, and boundaries of recreational drugs, palliative care drugs, and pharmaceuticals as well as struggles over product innovation, consumer protection, and freedom of choice in the medical marketplace. Scrutinizing how we have conceptualized and regulated drugs amid the pressing and competing interests of state regulatory bodies, pharmaceutical and for-profit companies, scientific researchers, and medical professionals, Richert asks how perceptions of a product shift – from dangerous substance to medical breakthrough, or vice versa. Through close examination of archival materials, accounts, and records, he brings substances into conversation with each other and demonstrates the contentious relationship between scientific knowledge, cultural assumptions, and social concerns. Weaving together stories of consumer resistance and government control, Strange Trips offers timely recommendations for the future of drug regulation.




A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti


Book Description

This book offers a critical anthropological perspective on contemporary childhood in Haiti. It is based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork carried out over a period of 13 years with vulnerable children in Haiti. Diane M. Hoffman raises important questions about how interventions by well-meaning foreigners and 'white saviors' often misrepresent Haitian culture and society as deficient, while privileging their own emotions alongside supposedly universal ideas about children that reinforce their own power to define and intervene in Haitian lives. She argues for a new approach to Haitian childhood that centers children's informal learning and self-education alongside indigenous spirituality and constructions of personhood that can resist the hegemony of neo-colonial and neo-liberal forces. Instead of representing the country and its children as a place of "problems to be solved," the book shows the importance prioritizing aspects of Haitian world-views in order to develop a more culturally-informed understanding of childhood in Haiti that can support genuine social change.




The Image of Disability


Book Description

A mainstay of modern life, the global media gives out information about disabilities that is often inaccurate or negative and perpetuates oppressive stigmas and discrimination. In response to representations that have been incomplete, misguided or unimaginative, this collection of new essays encourages scholars and allies to refashion media so as to disrupt the status quo and move toward more liberatory politics. Images in film, television and social media are assessed through the lenses of disabilities studies, media studies, cultural studies and intersectional studies involving critical race theory and gender.




Research Anthology on Improving Health Literacy Through Patient Communication and Mass Media


Book Description

Increasing health literacy among patients is a difficult task as medical jargon and healthcare directions can be overwhelming and difficult to comprehend. In today’s digital world, people are more connected than ever before and have the ability to find healthcare information in a way that was not possible in recent years. Mass media and social media have become particularly influential in conveying health information to the public. With the amount of misinformation being spread, coupled with poor health literacy skills, it is imperative that new strategies and policies are undertaken to ensure that patients and the general public receive accurate information and are appropriately educated in order to provide them with the best possible knowledge and care. The Research Anthology on Improving Health Literacy Through Patient Communication and Mass Media provides an overview of the importance of health literacy and the various means to achieve health literacy for patients using several strategies and elements such as patient communication and mass media. The book covers health awareness challenges that have been faced recently and historically and pushes for better patient-provider communication. The book also examines the use of social media, virtual support groups, and technological tools that aid in the facilitation of health knowledge. Covering a range of key topics such as patient safety, health illiteracy, and eHealth, this anthology is crucial for healthcare professionals, researchers, academicians, students, and those interested in understanding the importance of health literacy and how it connects to media and communication.




Handbook on Medical Tourism and Patient Mobility


Book Description

The growth of international travel for purposes of medical treatment has been accompanied by increased academic research and analysis. This Handbook explores the emergence of medical travel and patient mobility and the implications for patients and hea




The Routledge Handbook of Health Tourism


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Health Tourism provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the philosophical, conceptual and managerial issues in the field of health tourism with contributions from more than 30 expert academics and practitioners from around the world. Terms that are used frequently when defining health tourism, such as wellbeing, wellness, holistic, medical and spiritual, are analysed and explored, as is the role that health and health tourism play in quality-of-life enhancement, wellbeing, life satisfaction and happiness. An overview is provided of health tourism facilities such as thermal waters, spas, retreats and wellness hotels and the various challenges inherent in managing these profitably and sustainably. Typologies are given not only of subsectors of health tourism and related activities but also of destinations, such as natural landscapes, historic townscapes or individual resources or attractions around which whole infrastructures have been developed. Attention is paid to some of the lifestyle changes that are taking place in societies which influence consumer behaviour, motivations and demand for health tourism, including government policies, regulations and ethical considerations. This significant volume offers the reader a comprehensive synthesis of this field, conveying the latest thinking and research. The text is international in focus, encouraging dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and areas of study and will be an invaluable resource for all those with an interest in health tourism.




GLOBAL TOURISM & THE ENVIRONMENT: THE NECESSITIES FOR CLEAN ENERGY AND CLEAN TRANSPORTATION USAGES


Book Description

Global Tourism is a worldwide phenomenon that is the pulse of the world's economies with the major players being transportation, mass travel and energy consumption. Tourism is actually booming and the mass movement of people by air-, land- and water-transportation has tripled in the last several decades. Mass Tourism's dark side is the gas emissions' pollution of air, water and the environments by transporters' engines and infectious diseases. This is reaching alarming levels. Some of the most dire consequences are climate change, global warming and medication-resistant pathogens. GLOBAL TOURISM & THE ENVIRONMENT: THE NECESSITIES FOR CLEAN ENERGY & CLEAN TRANSPORTATION USAGES discusses ways to stem the tide of transportations' pollution and contamination of the Earth.