On the Sustainable Development of Medical Tourism: from Tourism and Medical Perspective

Medical tourism attracts increasingly more attention from scholars, however, the comprehensive summary to medical tourism is not found in the SSCI & SCI indexed journals. This study retrieved 52 papers from tourism journals and medical journals indexed by SSCI or SCI. Firstly, the reasons of the emergence of medical tourism are discussed in this paper, and then, these 52 papers, which are published in tourism and medical journals, are compared for the purpose of deeply understanding the sustainable development of medical tourism researches. The author found out that the articles originated from medical journals focus on social effects, legislation and policy, as well as medical and health issues, which are more descriptive and rarely involve complicated statistical methods. In contrast, the articles retrieved from tourism journals pay more attention to tourism; most authors are interested in the study of tourists' psychology, while quantitative methods e.g. regression analysis, structural equation and psychological theories are applied in many literatures. This research is helpful for the understanding of medical tourism research and may contribute to facilitate sustainable medical tourism development.