En route: Transport and Embodiment in International Medical Travel Journeys Between Indonesia and Malaysia

Abstract

International medical travel is increasingly major business. Using Indonesian patient-consumers’ transport experiences in the pursuit of private medical care in Malaysia, this study explores how transport operators and infrastructure are responding and adjusting to the embodied specificities of the growing market’s access and travel needs. In offering faster and more frequent linkages, they have both expanded the physical and geo-political scope and increased the immediacy of care provision. This underscores the value of examining how the mobile spaces of transport common to international medical travel actively intersect with, blur and re-articulate diverse understandings of ill-health and impairment, care and subjectivity.

Key Words:

• private healthcare consumption
• international medical travel
• medical tourism
• air and land transport
• therapeutic landscapes
• risk

Notes

1. That only 580,000 foreign patients across the entire country were reported in 2011 hints at significant gaps in official reporting practices (Ormond 2013).