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President's Dream Colloquium on Traveling for Health
Circumvention Tourism
Watch the Recorded Web Stream
Recorded on November 26, 2015
Lecture Topics
About the Lecture
Medical Outlaws or Medical Refugees?
Medical Tourism for Services Illegal in a Patient's Home Country
Medical tourism — travel by patients who are citizens and residents of one country to receive medical treatment in another country — is a growing multi-billion dollar industry involving hundreds of thousands of patients each year.
This talk focuses on individuals who use medical tourism to get access to services which are illegal in their home countries and will discuss the legal and ethical issues raised by two kinds of medical tourism:
- Travel for medical services which are legal in the patient’s destination country but illegal in the patient’s home country. This form of ‘circumvention tourism’ may include abortion, female genital cutting (FGC), assisted suicide, and reproductive technology usage.
- Travel for medical services which are illegal in both the patient’s home and destination country, but where an illegal service is more easily accessed abroad than at home. The best example is travel to purchase a kidney from one of the black markets in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Phillipines, and elsewhere.
About the Speaker
 |
Glenn Cohen Professor of Law Co-Director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics, Harvard University |
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Professor Cohen’s research projects include work on the legal and ethical dimensions of reproduction/reproductive technology, human subject research, health policy, and medical tourism. His research interests:
- Medical Tourism
- Law and Medicine
- Health Law
- Reproductive Rights
- Civic Procedure
- Family Law
He is the author of more than 60 articles and chapters and his award-winning work has appeared in leading medical (e.g. New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA), bioethics (e.g. American Journal of Bioethics), and public health (e.g. American Journal of Public Health) journals. He is the editor of the book The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Issues and is currently completing the monograph Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics, to be published by Oxford University Press.
Professor Cohen was selected as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow for the 2012–13 year and by the Greenwall Foundation to receive a Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics. He leads the Ethics and Law initiative as part of the multi-million dollar NIH funded Harvard Catalyst/The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center program. He is also one of three editors-in-chief of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, a peer-reviewed journal published by Oxford University Press.