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Beth Kangas

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Complicating Common Ideas about Medical Tourism: Gender, Class, and Globality in Yemenis’
International Medical Travel
Author(s): Beth Kangas
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Signs, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter 2011), pp. 327-332
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655912 .
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S I G N S Winter 2011 ❙ 327
Complicating Common Ideas about Medical Tourism: Gender,
Class, and Globality in Yemenis’ International Medical Travel
Beth Kangas
J
amila, the wife of a prominent businessman in Yemen, underwent a
complete medical checkup in Jordan, visiting a different doctor for
each part of her body. Jamila told me during our interview in Jordan
that she usually had her checkups in Italy during her husband’s business
trips there. This year, however, her husband’s work kept him in Yemen,
so Jamila traveled to Jordan with her son and her husband’s sister, who
also sought treatment. Her niece, a student in Jordan, advised them on
which medical facilities to use. Jamila’s husband telephoned every day to
check on her and see if she needed more than the $8,000 she had initially
brought.
Nabila’s headaches intensified three months after she married. She and
her husband visited several doctors and hospitals in Yemen before traveling
to Iraq in 1996 at the Yemeni government’s expense. Doctors there said
she had an untreatable shrinking in her brain. Nabila’s husband found his
bride to be unsuitable and returned her to her family’s home, Nabila’s
sister, Arwa, told me in our interview in Jordan. Arwa and Nabila visited
many hospitals in Yemen, but no one made a clear diagnosis. Day by day,
twenty-three-year-old Nabila grew worse. Finally, the two sisters traveled
to Jordan. A CT scan and MRI helped diagnose Nabila’s brain cancer.
Nabila and Arwa stayed in Jordan for the next nine months. They spent
over $11,000 for treatment, most of which the family had borrowed.
Thirty-six-year-old Amal and her brother traveled to Iraq for her kidney
transplantation. The family had borrowed the $3,000 to cover the costs.
The kidney came from a Palestinian woman whom her brother located
in Baghdad, Amal told me in our interview following her return to Yemen.
She could provide no further details about the logistics of the kidney
procurement but had been equally unclear about her medical condition
I thank Andrew Mazzaschi for including me in the symposium. I remain indebted to the
Yemeni patients and family members who shared with me their experiences of international
medical travel and the audiences over the years who have helped my ideas develop.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2011, vol. 36, no. 2]
 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2011/3602-0008$10.00
328 ❙ Symposium: Gender and Medical Tourism
when I first met her in Jordan. She instead focused on how her mother
cried when she and her brother left for the airport and once again when
they telephoned home. During our interview, Amal wore a surgical mask
to protect her from the germs and dust of the city. Her mother, hovering
over her, repeatedly asked me for reassurance that Amal looked better
than before she left. Although extremely vulnerable as a result of her
transplantation (as her mother was fully aware), Amal still considered
dialysis in Yemen’s unreliable medical system to have been the greater
health risk.
Introduction
The journeys of Jamila, Nabila, and Amal challenge current assumptions
about medical tourism. Much of the academic and popular coverage of
medical tourism centers on patients from industrialized countries. These
patients are said to bypass local services because of the high costs, long
waits, or prohibitive regulations. By contrast, Jamila, Nabila, and Amal
traveled from Yemen, a capital-poor country in the southwest corner of
the Arabian Peninsula. They left their country because of the lack of
specialized services or their mistrust of the services that did exist. At the
time of my research, in the 1990s, Yemen’s medical system did not have
the capabilities to treat cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, and other
complicated conditions. Patients had to go abroad to pursue medical care
they believed capable of prolonging lives and alleviating suffering. Com-
mon treatment destinations at the time included Jordan, India, Iraq, and
Egypt. As the journeys of Nabila and Amal illustrate, most Yemeni medical
travelers had to borrow money and sell whatever assets they could to
finance their journeys.
This article’s first contribution to discussions of medical tourism is to
incorporate patients from developing countries. The second contribution
is to dispute the term “medical tourism.” Calling this growing global
phenomenon “medical tourism” emphasizes the merging of two indus-
tries—medicine and tourism—and prioritizes the treatment destinations
and facilitators over the patients. The term suggests leisure and frivolity,
diminishing the hardships that patients face. As neutral terms, I prefer
“international medical travel” or “transnational medical journeys” (Kangas
2010).
The journeys of Jamila, Nabila, and Arwa help to complicate common
ideas about gender, class, and globality within medical tourism. They
caution us to resist segmenting off parts of the global population into
developing and developed countries, immobile females and uncaring
S I G N S Winter 2011 ❙ 329
males, and the extravagant wealthy and exploited poor. Speaking in gen-
eralizations and stereotypes interferes with our abilities to uncover the
commonalities and complexities within international medical travel.
Gender
That the three women traveled outside of Yemen—and for their own
medical conditions—challenges a common stereotype of Middle Eastern
women as oppressed and lacking mobility. Out of the seventy-one cases
I learned about from interviews with Yemeni medical travelers in India
and Jordan, twenty-seven (38 percent) were female patients, ranging in
age from fifteen to over sixty-five years old (Kangas 2007, 317–25). We
might be tempted to generalize from this sample that more males than
females have access to expensive medical care abroad. However, for an
accurate conclusion, we need additional research on the prevalence of
serious medical conditions within Yemen by sex and age. We might find
that more males than females need specialized medical care abroad because
of a greater likelihood to suffer from cancer and complicated cardiac, renal,
orthopedic, and neurological conditions. We must also note that medical
journeys for female patients (and children) can cost more than for adult
males because they often require two travel companions. Ideally, both a
female and male family member accompany a female patient, and both
parents accompany a child. The female companion cares for the patient
in the hospital while the male companion negotiates the often unfamiliar
world “outside.”
To understand the gender dynamics within international medical travel,
we need to examine not only the prevalence of the various medical con-
ditions by sex and the differing costs involved but also the social and
symbolic meanings. In Yemen, male household members acquire social
and moral capital by sending female members abroad and feel social pres-
sure to do so. Anne Meneley (1996, 115) observes in her study of women’s
social gatherings in a Yemeni town that a husband has two sanctioned
ways to publicly demonstrate his affection for his wife: through gifts of
gold jewelry and through the time and money he spends on her medical
care. Expensive foreign medical care proclaims vast affection, to the patient
and to those around her; a lack of care raises concerns (Kangas 2002,
49). Jamila emphasized to me her husband’s readiness to send additional
money for her medical checkups. Arwa criticized the indifference with
which Nabila’s husband sought treatment for her, exerting the effort to
travel to Iraq only when the government subsidized the journey. Un-
married Amal received the care and companionship of her brothers. While
330 ❙ Symposium: Gender and Medical Tourism
exploring the meanings associated with medical care abroad, however, we
should not dismiss these efforts as merely symbolic. I do not want to
suggest that male family members are only performing their care rather
than feeling it.
Class
The journeys of Jamila, Nabila, and Amal illustrate class differences within
Yemenis’ international medical travel. Jamila has the ready finances to seek
complete annual checkups in Italy and Jordan. Nabila and Amal must bor-
row money they may never be able to pay back in order to pursue life-
prolonging treatments for their brain cancer and kidney failure, respectively.
Given the contrast in the ease of travel and type of medical care sought,
we might want to characterize the medical journeys of the poor as a need
and of the wealthy as a desire. We might even be tempted to call Jamila’s
journey a medical shopping spree. However, in our efforts to criticize
inequities in access to health care, I caution against trivializing or ridiculing
the care of the wealthy. We risk caricatures rather than compassion.
Stories of wealthy patients from Gulf countries who travel abroad for
medical care often dwell on the extravagance—the large entourages and
expansive accommodations. We miss the suffering that motivates the travel
and the family members’ concern for the patients. Similarly, medical trav-
elers from developing countries are often discounted as the elite, as though
we needed no additional details. Nonwealthy patients from the Gulf and
developing countries are also dehumanized when their travel is interpreted
as an elite pattern, the suggestion being that these patients traveled in
order to emulate the journeys of prominent members of society rather
than to try to prolong their lives (unless trying to prolong lives is an elite
pattern).
While calling for equity in health care, we do not want to begrudge
the wealthy their care or recoveries. Jamila’s annual checkups in Italy and
Jordan could allow the early detection of a serious condition. If stricken
with one, she too would need to seek life-prolonging treatments abroad.
In the pursuit of health, the distinction between a need and a desire is
often fraught with judgments, exaggerations, and callousness.
Globality
I begin this section by further critiquing the depictions of the wealthy
and poor within international medical travel in order to call for analyses
that capture complexities rather than construct dichotomies. I take the
S I G N S Winter 2011 ❙ 331
example of what has been called transplant tourism. This form of medical
tourism is often defined as rich foreigners traveling to buy the organs of
the poor, who have no choice but to sell them. Presented in this way, the
issue is easy to condemn: the wealthy are exploiting the poor (see, e.g.,
Scheper-Hughes 2000, 2003). Once again, however, the suffering of the
medical travelers is elided; we gain little knowledge about the medical
conditions that sent them abroad and the concerns and fears that they
have for their lives. Furthermore, Amal’s medical journey complicates the
discussion. Amal is a relatively poor patient from a poor country who
borrowed money to have a transplantation. She opted for the transplan-
tation because she believed that she would likely die from dialysis in her
country’s unreliable medical system. She did not have a relative able to
donate, but even if she did, she would have needed to travel abroad to
have the transplantation performed; at the time of my research, Yemen
lacked the ability to do them. The example of a relatively poor person
from Yemen going into debt to acquire a kidney from a Palestinian woman
in Iraq requires a much more nuanced analysis than “rich foreigners ex-
ploiting poor locals.”
The issue of procuring kidneys touches on many of the circulations
that characterize today’s interconnected world, an interconnectedness that
I stress with the heading “globality.” The dizzying global circulations of
people, goods, money, labor, images, and ideas create a sense of con-
nectedness. They also fascinate us as we learn that one more aspect of life
has begun shifting locales rather than staying in place—bodies and body
parts. These corporal global circulations generate intrigue. The unbound-
ing of organs, cells, tissue, eggs, and sperm commands us to think about
entitlement, ownership, and belonging as never before. However, we can
become so caught up in the mobility of the body parts and its implications
that we overlook the individuals who need (and provide) them.
Conclusion
The journeys of Jamila, Nabila, and Amal from the capital-poor country
of Yemen encourage us to delve into the complexities of medical tourism.
We need to question the term itself and the prioritizing of the medical
tourism industry over the patients. We must also uncover the common-
alities and particularities within all international medical travel rather than
overlook or discount individuals from developing countries. The gender
and class implications of transnational medical journeys require nuanced
analyses that guard against caricature. The global circulations of bodies
and body parts intrigue us for their refusal to remain in situ, but this
332 ❙ Symposium: Gender and Medical Tourism
should not lead to the demonization of the recipients. In conclusion, the
three journeys remind us of the importance of focusing on people and
their experiences to help humanize our concepts.
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Oakland University
References
Kangas, Beth. 2002. “Therapeutic Itineraries in a Global World: Yemenis and
Their Search for Biomedical Treatment Abroad.” Medical Anthropology 21(1):
35–78.
———. 2007. “Lack of Treatment Capacity, Lack of Trust: Yemenis’ Medical
Treatment Abroad.” In Yemen into the Twenty-first Century: Continuity and
Change, ed. Kamil A. Mahdi, Anna Würth, and Helen Lackner, 293–326.
Reading: Ithaca.
———. 2010. “Traveling for Medical Care in a Global World.” Medical Anthro-
pology 29(4):344–62.
Meneley, Anne. 1996. Tournaments of Value: Sociability and Hierarchy in a Yemeni
Town. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2000. “The Global Traffic in Human Organs.” Current
Anthropology 41(2):191–211.
———. 2003. “Keeping an Eye on the Global Traffic in Human Organs.” Lancet
361(9369):1645–48.
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Complicating common ideas about medical tourism: gender, class, and globality

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