Chinese spur medical tourism in US

 15-Apr-16, China Daily

The US is enjoying a record number of tourists from China, but not all are coming to see well-known sites. Some have come for medical treatments they cannot get at home, reports Lia Zhu from San Francisco and Amy He from New York.

Image: Li Ming and Cai Meng / China Daily

Though there is no data indicating how many Chinese go overseas for medical treatment, various sources estimate that more than 3,000 Chinese patients came to the US last year for medical care, and about three quarters of them sought treatment for cancer - the most common ones including lung, breast, liver and stomach.

"This is a relatively new thing in the last two years that many people from China have been coming to the US for medical care. Prior to that, there were very small numbers," said Spencer Koerner, medical director of the Center for International Health and Telemedicine at Cedars-Sinai. "We noticed a year and a half ago when we started receiving more patients from China and many of them were recommended by people living in San Gabriel Valley."

Competition among US hospitals for Chinese patients is heating up as they flood the US market, particularly lung cancer patients from large industrial centers like Beijing and Guangzhou in South China's Guangdong province, said Josef Woodman, CEO of Patients Beyond Borders, a company that publishes medical travel guides.

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