Medical Tourism Is Booming, Fueled by High Costs and Slow Access
When Bridget Snell found out she had multiple sclerosis, she knew she would put up a fight. The 45 year-old mother of two, who lives in Duxbury, Mass., researched options to slow the progress of the disease. The methods she had been trying were invasive, often with side effects of their own.
An estimated 2.2 million Americans will travel abroad for medical care in 2020.
Then she stumbled upon autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (AHSCT), an experimental and controversial procedure that uses the patient's own stem cells to try to halt the progress of the disease. The FDA has not approved this procedure and last year issued a warning about unapproved stem cell therapies.
Despite the lack of established science, Snell weighed her options and decided she would undergo the procedure at Clinica Ruiz, a private clinic in Puebla, Mexico, which boasts of the largest volume of cases in the world using the procedure to treat MS. In April 2018, she went to Mexico for treatment, returned home in a month, and continues to do well.
But a positive outcome is far from assured, says Sheldon Krimsky, adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Tufts School of Medicine.
"Often you can't get a good sense of what the quality of treatment is in another country," Krimsky says, adding that many companies promise procedures whose results have not been clinically validated. "Unfortunately, people are very easily persuaded by hope."
Traveling for Medical Care
Snell is one of many Americans who have traveled abroad to access medical care. Patients Beyond Borders, a medical tourism consultancy, estimates that 2.2 million Americans will do so in 2020. A 2018 BCC report projected a five-year compounded annual industry growth rate of 13.2 percent. Adding to the demand is the aging population, which is expected to reach 95 million people by 2060 – nearly double the number in 2018.
While Snell traveled to Mexico to try a procedure that was not yet available in the United States, other patients do so for a variety of reasons, primarily cost and speed of access. For example, despite having "pretty good insurance coverage," Washington resident Soniya Gadgil needed dental procedures that would have cost thousands of dollars out-of-pocket. An India native, she decided to travel to Pune, India to visit her parents -- and while there, she got the two root canals and implant that she needed. Gadgil saved 60 percent on the final bill.
Leaving the country for medical care is not restricted to dental work or FDA-banned procedures either. Patients visit countries around the world — South America, Central America, and the Caribbean top the list — for a number of other problems, such as knee and hip replacements and bariatric operations. The most common procedures sought abroad are for dentistry, cosmetic surgery, and cardiac conditions.
Traveling abroad to access less expensive procedures is a damning indictment of healthcare delivery in the United States, says Dr. Leigh Turner, associate professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. "We have people who are being forced out of the system because of high costs. Collectively it suggests a real structural problem in terms of the organization of healthcare in the United States," Turner says.
The Growth of the Online Marketplace
Nevertheless, medical tourism is booming and a number of online businesses now meet patients' demand for discovery and facilitation of medical care abroad, like PlanMyMedicalTrip.com, Doctoorum.com, and Wellness Travels.
Anurav Rane, CEO and Founder of PlanMyMedicalTrip.com, says the company presents each potential client with options, a la Expedia. A knee replacement in India costs $2,500, a significantly cheaper option even with a $1,110 round-trip airfare from the United States, Rane says. The average cost for an inpatient total knee replacement in the United States in 2019 was a little more $30,000.
Once the client chooses a specific procedure at a specific hospital, the company facilitates the necessary groundwork including the medical visa, tickets, hotel stay, booking the procedure and pre and post-op stay, and consults with the surgeons or doctors even before arrival. "The hassle of planning is on us," Rane says. Once patients are settled in the accommodations, they undergo the procedure.
Playing in the Legal Shadows
The online marketplace companies and the medical team execute an orchestrated dance – but what happens if the patient is harmed during or after the procedure?
Turner says that medical malpractice, if it occurs, can be difficult to pursue abroad. "There are countries where the courts are notoriously slow and it's very difficult to get any kind of meaningful action and settlements," he says, even if the claims have a legitimate basis.
The industry's biggest challenge is trust.
Snell signed a waiver absolving her surgeons in Mexico of any legal claims. But, she points out, that's standard process even for procedures in the United States. "I signed just as many waivers as I would going into any surgery [in the US]."
While that might well be true, Turner argues, Americans don't waive legal rights when they sign consent forms. "There are some protections for patients here in the United States."
Beyond U.S. Medical Tourism
As expected, it's not just Americans who travel abroad for medical care. Lithuania-based Wellness Travels sees a significant percentage of its clients from the EU. PlanMyMedicaltrip.com has 15,000 surgeons and doctors from 12 countries in its database. Egypt-based Doctoorum works with professionals in its own country and attracts clients from the Middle East. It is looking to expand to include doctors from Jordan and India, among other countries.
The term "tourism" is misleading here because it muddies the picture about what post-op should really look like, says Gediminas Kondrackis of Wellness Travels. "Unfortunately a lot of medical travel facilitators mislead their clients by advertising beach holiday packages and the like. Post-op is really about quiet recovery inside for a few days; being out in the sun is not advisable."
The industry's biggest challenge is trust. "The dentist I went to is actually a friend of mine who has a successful practice for several years," says Gadgil, the Washington resident who had dental work done in India. "I'd hesitate to go to someone I don't know or to a place I have no experience with." Her apprehensions are not unusual. After all, anxiety is an expected reaction to any surgery. Word-of-mouth, cost savings, and thorough research may alleviate some of these trust issues.
"I had natural apprehensions and would have had them had I gone up the road to Brigham and Women's (in Boston) just as I did over the border," Snell says, "but I had done my homework extensively. That took a lot of the fear out of it."
Medical tourism will only increase, predicts Kondrackis. "There is still a lot of room to grow. Higher numbers of medical travelers could help reduce the strain on local healthcare systems by reducing wait times and controlling costs."
While patients who have benefited from medical tourism swear by it, the best cure would be to start at home by establishing healthcare equity, Krimsky says.
On the flip side, says Turner, it is debatable whether medical tourism actually benefits host countries, where local residents might get priced out of procedures at these exclusive clinics. Even if laws in host countries such as India might mandate "charity care" for poorer local patients, that does not always happen, Turner says. The trickle-down theory that these more expensive clinics will broaden access to care is often a pipe dream, he adds.
While patients who have benefited from medical tourism swear by it, the best cure would be to start at home by establishing healthcare equity, Krimsky says. "Now if we had universal healthcare in the United States," he adds, "that would be an entirely different story."
Or maybe not. Rane, of PlanMyMedicalTrip.com, has observed an influx of patients to India from Canada, a country with universal healthcare.
The reason they say they travel for care? Long wait times for procedures.
A new type of cancer therapy is shrinking deadly brain tumors with just one treatment
Few cancers are deadlier than glioblastomas—aggressive and lethal tumors that originate in the brain or spinal cord. Five years after diagnosis, less than five percent of glioblastoma patients are still alive—and more often, glioblastoma patients live just 14 months on average after receiving a diagnosis.
But an ongoing clinical trial at Mass General Cancer Center is giving new hope to glioblastoma patients and their families. The trial, called INCIPIENT, is meant to evaluate the effects of a special type of immune cell, called CAR-T cells, on patients with recurrent glioblastoma.
How CAR-T cell therapy works
CAR-T cell therapy is a type of cancer treatment called immunotherapy, where doctors modify a patient’s own immune system specifically to find and destroy cancer cells. In CAR-T cell therapy, doctors extract the patient’s T-cells, which are immune system cells that help fight off disease—particularly cancer. These T-cells are harvested from the patient and then genetically modified in a lab to produce proteins on their surface called chimeric antigen receptors (thus becoming CAR-T cells), which makes them able to bind to a specific protein on the patient’s cancer cells. Once modified, these CAR-T cells are grown in the lab for several weeks so that they can multiply into an army of millions. When enough cells have been grown, these super-charged T-cells are infused back into the patient where they can then seek out cancer cells, bind to them, and destroy them. CAR-T cell therapies have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat certain types of lymphomas and leukemias, as well as multiple myeloma, but haven’t been approved to treat glioblastomas—yet.
CAR-T cell therapies don’t always work against solid tumors, such as glioblastomas. Because solid tumors contain different kinds of cancer cells, some cells can evade the immune system’s detection even after CAR-T cell therapy, according to a press release from Massachusetts General Hospital. For the INCIPIENT trial, researchers modified the CAR-T cells even further in hopes of making them more effective against solid tumors. These second-generation CAR-T cells (called CARv3-TEAM-E T cells) contain special antibodies that attack EFGR, a protein expressed in the majority of glioblastoma tumors. Unlike other CAR-T cell therapies, these particular CAR-T cells were designed to be directly injected into the patient’s brain.
The INCIPIENT trial results
The INCIPIENT trial involved three patients who were enrolled in the study between March and July 2023. All three patients—a 72-year-old man, a 74-year-old man, and a 57-year-old woman—were treated with chemo and radiation and enrolled in the trial with CAR-T cells after their glioblastoma tumors came back.
The results, which were published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), were called “rapid” and “dramatic” by doctors involved in the trial. After just a single infusion of the CAR-T cells, each patient experienced a significant reduction in their tumor sizes. Just two days after receiving the infusion, the glioblastoma tumor of the 72-year-old man decreased by nearly twenty percent. Just two months later the tumor had shrunk by an astonishing 60 percent, and the change was maintained for more than six months. The most dramatic result was in the 57-year-old female patient, whose tumor shrank nearly completely after just one infusion of the CAR-T cells.
The results of the INCIPIENT trial were unexpected and astonishing—but unfortunately, they were also temporary. For all three patients, the tumors eventually began to grow back regardless of the CAR-T cell infusions. According to the press release from MGH, the medical team is now considering treating each patient with multiple infusions or prefacing each treatment with chemotherapy to prolong the response.
While there is still “more to do,” says co-author of the study neuro-oncologist Dr. Elizabeth Gerstner, the results are still promising. If nothing else, these second-generation CAR-T cell infusions may someday be able to give patients more time than traditional treatments would allow.
“These results are exciting but they are also just the beginning,” says Dr. Marcela Maus, a doctor and professor of medicine at Mass General who was involved in the clinical trial. “They tell us that we are on the right track in pursuing a therapy that has the potential to change the outlook for this intractable disease.”
Since the early 2000s, AI systems have eliminated more than 1.7 million jobs, and that number will only increase as AI improves. Some research estimates that by 2025, AI will eliminate more than 85 million jobs.
But for all the talk about job security, AI is also proving to be a powerful tool in healthcare—specifically, cancer detection. One recently published study has shown that, remarkably, artificial intelligence was able to detect 20 percent more cancers in imaging scans than radiologists alone.
Published in The Lancet Oncology, the study analyzed the scans of 80,000 Swedish women with a moderate hereditary risk of breast cancer who had undergone a mammogram between April 2021 and July 2022. Half of these scans were read by AI and then a radiologist to double-check the findings. The second group of scans was read by two researchers without the help of AI. (Currently, the standard of care across Europe is to have two radiologists analyze a scan before diagnosing a patient with breast cancer.)
The study showed that the AI group detected cancer in 6 out of every 1,000 scans, while the radiologists detected cancer in 5 per 1,000 scans. In other words, AI found 20 percent more cancers than the highly-trained radiologists.
Scientists have been using MRI images (like the ones pictured here) to train artificial intelligence to detect cancers earlier and with more accuracy. Here, MIT's AI system, MIRAI, looks for patterns in a patient's mammograms to detect breast cancer earlier than ever before. news.mit.edu
But even though the AI was better able to pinpoint cancer on an image, it doesn’t mean radiologists will soon be out of a job. Dr. Laura Heacock, a breast radiologist at NYU, said in an interview with CNN that radiologists do much more than simply screening mammograms, and that even well-trained technology can make errors. “These tools work best when paired with highly-trained radiologists who make the final call on your mammogram. Think of it as a tool like a stethoscope for a cardiologist.”
AI is still an emerging technology, but more and more doctors are using them to detect different cancers. For example, researchers at MIT have developed a program called MIRAI, which looks at patterns in patient mammograms across a series of scans and uses an algorithm to model a patient's risk of developing breast cancer over time. The program was "trained" with more than 200,000 breast imaging scans from Massachusetts General Hospital and has been tested on over 100,000 women in different hospitals across the world. According to MIT, MIRAI "has been shown to be more accurate in predicting the risk for developing breast cancer in the short term (over a 3-year period) compared to traditional tools." It has also been able to detect breast cancer up to five years before a patient receives a diagnosis.
The challenges for cancer-detecting AI tools now is not just accuracy. AI tools are also being challenged to perform consistently well across different ages, races, and breast density profiles, particularly given the increased risks that different women face. For example, Black women are 42 percent more likely than white women to die from breast cancer, despite having nearly the same rates of breast cancer as white women. Recently, an FDA-approved AI device for screening breast cancer has come under fire for wrongly detecting cancer in Black patients significantly more often than white patients.
As AI technology improves, radiologists will be able to accurately scan a more diverse set of patients at a larger volume than ever before, potentially saving more lives than ever.