Wise Young

What can we do to maximize the benefits and minimize the harm from medical tourism. One week ago I gave a 30 minute interview on Al Jazeera television watched by 30 million people. Arabs routinely leave their countries for medical treatment when they have serious health problems. This is legitimate medical tourism . . . within the USA we travel to other states for the best care.

Two weeks ago I was in India . . . the head of a hospital there told me that their primary market was medical tourists, mostly from Africa and the Middle East. This one hospital system gets over a million patients a year. One of the things we worry about is how this is stealing from the local care.

For the 10% of medical tourism that interests us here . . . we have this strange artificial situation that's developed because of our current political environment.

But there are also medical tourists who just can't get non-esc treatments here in the USA.

People should be careful not to assume that those who travel overseas are "desperate" . . . the typical case who comes to me is a young man, 10 or 15 years after a sci . . . he comes to me and says, "what is the best therapy?"

If I tell them not to go anywhere, they'll seek the answer from someone else. They've made up their minds that they want to try something . . . they're determined, they're impatient, they just don't want to wait anymore. It's not desperation.

We all know the problems. Overseas you don't know what you're getting, and if something goes wrong you have no recourse.

We should understand that no matter what we do or say, there will be people who make this choice--until we offer therapies.

When I announced that we would be doing clinical trials with umbilical cord blood trials with lithium in China, hundreds and hundreds of people from the USA came and asked me if they could come to China to be in them. It's outrageous

The regulatory situation in China is even worse than here-- seven layers of bureaucracy vs just the FDA. Based on this, I've decided to not wait for a change in administration . . . we're just going to go ahead and do it.

We got the CDRPA out of mothballs last spring, we attached it to an omnibus bill, we -- well, we spent 6 years of lobbying in Washington to get a measly clinical trials bill through our legislature. So it shouldn't surprise anybody that people look at that and say, wow . . . why don't I just spend a thousand bucks and go to China for this treatment.

What we don't want to do is leave this to ad hoc centers . . . trials need to be carefully designed and held here in the USA.
We have to monitor patients before and after they go. We have to do everything we can to educate our communities.

A website is a one-sided picture. I now spend 8 hours a day on this website. It's a place where people can discuss and present multiple sides of the story . . . which is absolutely critical for the evolution of this process . . . we as scientists and clinicians must be on these websites spending time on these websites, talking to the community and informing the discussion.

Medical tourism is here to stay. We have to understand how to maximize its benefit and minimize its harm.