Medical Makeover Tourism in South-East Asia

Brisbane.
The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Michael Galvin, who focusses on a number of trends related to medical tourism and makeover culture. There are now a number of operators offering package travel deals which offer makeover holidays that include tourism, beauty treatment, and cosmetic, elective, or even very serious surgery components - often offering trips to destinations like Malaysia where the costs for such procedures are substantially cheaper.

Websites advertising these services provide brochure-style information about the getaway hotels as well as the hospitals involved, and potential clients are positioned both as potential patient and potential tourist - packages offered include the 'mummy makeover', for example, and describe a fairytale makeover story. (The Singapore tourism board similarly has a special 'Singapore health' brochure.)

Thailand is the leader in South-East Asia - it had 250,000 medical tourists last year (India had over one million, and is the global leader). Some 750,000 US citizens engaged in medical tourism last year,and it is expected to be a US$21 billion industry by 2012. This is something of a reversal of older trends which saw wealthy foreigners travel to US and European health centres and health resorts to address their medical issues.

Makeover culture in its current form, however, has arisen in a very short time, following the recent trend of makeover shows on television. This idea of the reinvention of the self is fundamentally changing the idea of biological time, and associated life narratives - makeovers promise a kind of life reset button, allowing customers to switch back from 40 to 20, from 50 to 30.

What happens to individual biography when the protagonist is continually reinvented, and when this identity is also hybridised by transnational crossover culture? Also, how does this makeover culture affect personnel development, in a context in which individuals now need to be flexible and are required to reinvent their lives and personal appearance in response to new professional demands?

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