IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v301y2022ics0277953622002568.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Gender, health, and labor in Thailand's medical hub

Author

Listed:
  • Farber, Reya

Abstract

As global economic and political conditions shift, Asian countries have placed technologies at the center of their development strategies, fostering new levels of wealth and expertise, but also generating new inequities. Among the most successful of these state-supported strategies have been efforts to develop and invest in new medical technologies, and recruit patients willing to travel across national borders for health care, in a process known as medical tourism. Medical tourism has afforded countries like Thailand greater wealth and prestige, and can also increase disparities for people in destination countries by encouraging specialized and privatized services catered towards wealthier patients. However, sparse research has focused on how these state strategies to promote medical tourism affect the health outcomes of people in destination countries, nor on the gendered labor that supports these state strategies. This article fills these gaps by analyzing medical tourism in Thailand as a gendered techno-development strategy, or a state-sponsored initiative which incorporates gendered labor and technologies, while also creating gendered health inequities. The article bridges a political economy approach to global health with gendered analyses of health and labor. The analysis draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, conducted in 2016 and 2017–2018, and in-depth interviews with 62 participants. It illuminates the gendered labor relations that help foster state development strategies such as medical tourism, as well as gendered health outcomes for people in a destination country.

Suggested Citation

  • Farber, Reya, 2022. "Gender, health, and labor in Thailand's medical hub," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 301(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:301:y:2022:i:c:s0277953622002568
    DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114950
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953622002568
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114950?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bell, Susan E. & Figert, Anne E., 2012. "Medicalization and pharmaceuticalization at the intersections: Looking backward, sideways and forward," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(5), pages 775-783.
    2. Holliday, Ruth & Bell, David & Cheung, Olive & Jones, Meredith & Probyn, Elspeth, 2015. "Brief encounters: Assembling cosmetic surgery tourism," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 298-304.
    3. Gkiouleka, Anna & Huijts, Tim & Beckfield, Jason & Bambra, Clare, 2018. "Understanding the micro and macro politics of health: Inequalities, intersectionality & institutions - A research agenda," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 200(C), pages 92-98.
    4. John Connell, 2015. "Medical tourism – concepts and definitions," Chapters, in: Neil Lunt & Daniel Horsfall & Johanna Hanefeld (ed.), Handbook on Medical Tourism and Patient Mobility, chapter 2, pages 16-24, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    5. Heidi Kaspar & Margaret Walton-Roberts & Audrey Bochaton, 2019. "Therapeutic mobilities," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(1), pages 1-19, January.
    6. Hanssmann, Christoph, 2020. "Epidemiological rage: Population, biography, and state responsibility in trans- health activism," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 247(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Laura Kemppainen & Veera Koskinen & Harley Bergroth & Eetu Marttila & Teemu Kemppainen, 2021. "Health and Wellness–Related Travel: A Scoping Study of the Literature in 2010-2018," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(2), pages 21582440211, May.
    2. Daoud, Adel & Johansson, Fredrik, 2019. "Estimating Treatment Heterogeneity of International Monetary Fund Programs on Child Poverty with Generalized Random Forest," SocArXiv awfjt, Center for Open Science.
    3. Maria Alessandra Antonelli & Giorgia Marini, 2023. "Good health with good institutions. An empirical analysis for italian regions," Public Finance Research Papers 61, Istituto di Economia e Finanza, DSGE, Sapienza University of Rome.
    4. Dew, Kevin & Norris, Pauline & Gabe, Jonathan & Chamberlain, Kerry & Hodgetts, Darrin, 2015. "Moral discourses and pharmaceuticalised governance in households," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 131(C), pages 272-279.
    5. Rambotti, Simone, 2020. "Is there a relationship between welfare-state policies and suicide rates? Evidence from the U.S. states, 2000–2015," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 246(C).
    6. Immergut, Ellen M. & Schneider, Simone M., 2020. "Is it unfair for the affluent to be able to purchase “better” healthcare? Existential standards and institutional norms in healthcare attitudes across 28 countries," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 267(C).
    7. Başaran, Oyman, 2020. "“The self-making of the scientific circumciser (fenni sünnetçi):” the medicalization of male circumcision in Turkey," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 265(C).
    8. Mamo, Laura & Epstein, Steven, 2014. "The pharmaceuticalization of sexual risk: Vaccine development and the new politics of cancer prevention," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 155-165.
    9. Jolidon, Vladimir, 2022. "Gender inequality and mammography screening: Does living with a partner improve women's mammography uptake?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 298(C).
    10. Terrence D. Hill & Jason A. Ford & Harvey L. Nicholson, 2022. "Education and polypharmacy: A national study of racial and ethnic variations," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 103(7), pages 1687-1705, December.
    11. Unruh, Lynn & Rice, Thomas & Rosenau, Pauline Vaillancourt & Barnes, Andrew J., 2016. "The 2013 cholesterol guideline controversy: Would better evidence prevent pharmaceuticalization?," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(7), pages 797-808.
    12. Jo M. Hale & Daniel C. Schneider & Neil K. Mehta & Mikko Myrskylä, 2022. "Understanding cognitive impairment in the U.S. through the lenses of intersectionality and (un)conditional cumulative (dis)advantage," MPIDR Working Papers WP-2022-029, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
    13. Khalid, Shazmin & Dixon, Shrijna & Vijayasingham, Lavanya, 2022. "The gender responsiveness of social entrepreneurship in health – A review of initiatives by Ashoka fellows," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 293(C).
    14. Pollock, Anne & Jones, David S., 2015. "Coronary artery disease and the contours of pharmaceuticalization," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 131(C), pages 221-227.
    15. Hallin, Daniel C. & Brandt, Marisa & Briggs, Charles L., 2013. "Biomedicalization and the public sphere: Newspaper coverage of health and medicine, 1960s–2000s," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 121-128.
    16. King, Erika L. & Snowden, David L., 2020. "Serving on multiple fronts: A grounded theory model of complex decision-making in military mental health care," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 250(C).
    17. Timmermans, Stefan & Tietbohl, Caroline, 2018. "Fifty years of sociological leadership at Social Science and Medicine," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 196(C), pages 209-215.
    18. Gkiouleka, Anna & Huijts, Tim, 2020. "Intersectional migration-related health inequalities in Europe: Exploring the role of migrant generation, occupational status & gender," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 267(C).
    19. Barker, Kristin K., 2014. "Mindfulness meditation: Do-it-yourself medicalization of every moment," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 168-176.
    20. Franchina, Loreley & Sarradon-Eck, Aline & Arnault, Yolande & Le Corroller, Anne-Gaëlle & Zunic, Patricia & Marino, Patricia, 2022. "Lived experience of State-sponsored intra-national overseas therapeutic mobility for stem cell transplantation," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 301(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:301:y:2022:i:c:s0277953622002568. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.