Essay On Medical Voluntourism

Volunteer tourism or “voluntourism” is a fast growing field that combines the leisure of holidays with the desire to alleviate the suffering caused by deep social illnesses (Barbieri et al., 2012). Medical voluntourism specifically focuses on offering healthcare, spanning from mobile day clinics to surgical clinics, to host communities. Medical voluntourism, therefore, attracts a wide variety of volunteers including undergraduate students, medical students and practicing medical students. As a result, the literature on medical voluntourism is broad in context. Research in this field has credited medical voluntourism with bringing sustainable and beneficial healthcare to communities in need (Ott & Olson, 2011) while also providing a gratifying experience, both professionally and culturally, to the …show more content…
This zeal is often accompanied by a baseless arrogance that whatever the volunteer has to offer to the community will better the lives of its inhabitants. Bishop & Litch (2000) were expatriate doctors living in Nepal and serving a community of about 10,000 inhabitants where they studied the actions and results of several groups of physicians on short medical voluntourism trips in that community. Most of these volunteers established their clinics about 100 yards from the local healthcare clinic. Their lack of association with the local healthcare clinic undermined the existing system. This intentional distinction between “international healthcare” and treatment offered by the local physicians highlights the superiority that the foreign doctors placed on the healthcare they offered. This is a perfect illustration of the “inappropriate arrogance [in assuming] that anything that a Western doctor [had] to offer his less developed neighbor [was] progress” (Bishop & Litch,