India’s booming private healthcare system is expected to be worth billions of dollars in the decades to come, as westerners flock to India to get healthy. Fed up with long lines and exorbitant fees at home, these patients can now fly to the subcontinent and go straight to the front of the line for cheap operations in newly built, hi-tech hospitals.

Averill Dollery who lives in Worcestershire in the U.K.suffers from chronic pain; a pinched nerve in her back is destroying her quality of life. Averill can’t get an operation to fix her back because the National Health Service considers that her weight problem would make the spinal surgery she requires too dangerous. But salvation is at hand - in the form of India’s Doctor Prathap Reddy. Reddy is a cardiologist, a medical entrepreneur and the driving force behind the Apollo Hospital empire. All Averill has to do to get help is sign up, pay up and get on a plane to New Delhi.

But for the many millions of Indians who live in abject poverty the health system barely functions. India’s overstretched and under resourced public health system is failing its people. With the rapidly growing private sector catering to prosperous medical tourists, the health care of ordinary Indians is being neglected.

"Recommended .India: Medical Tourism points out the ever increasing global chasm between the rich and poor, and magnifies it in the microcosm of New Delhi health care. ...would be appropriate for library collections supporting health sciences, economics, sociology and business classes." Educational Media Reviews Online-
"Suitable for high school and college courses in cultural anthropology, medical anthropology/sociology, development, culture and tourism.and South Asian Studies, as well as for public audiences"Architectural Review Database