THE MEDICAL TOURISM - THE FUNDAMENTAL SOCIOECONOMIC ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND CONDITIONS

The article focuses on selected issues forming the functioning of the general background of the phenomenon of the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which is defined as a medical tourism. The analysis was based on the English language literature, trying to consider in the article, only the trends based on recent work. The reference point of the discussion are the fundamental problems of the medical tourismwithin sociology, psychology, and contact between the business practice and the economics of tourism. It is demonstrated that in the sociologyexists the phenomenon of opposing views on global mobility of medical tourists from the socio-political trends that reduce this mobility. There is one sided attitude highlighted of research in psychology which is the interest in themes of travel, of lesser importance attributed to the effects of travel for medical purposes. Problems of a gap between the tourism economics and the business practice is illustrated by pointing to the lack of compatibility of medical tourism definition of the term medical tourism, and in addition demonstrated the limited reliability of the data on the scale and size of the phenomenon. In the conclusion part it is highlighted the lack of a unified strategy sciences on the study of global and fragmented aspects of medical tourism, stressing at the same time the existence of two phenomenas: the fetishization of the growth of medical tourism and the lack of reliable data on the dimensions of this phenomenon.