Bioethics and health tourism

The Dominican Health Tourism Association promotes high quality health tourism, with transparency of processes, credentials and costs.

Due to the important correlation between bioethics and good practices in this sector, the renowned and respected bioethicist Dr. Miguel Suazo gives us his perspectives:

The interest of people to seek health and well-being is increasingly frequent and for this reason they are mobilized, for different reasons, from one country to another where they consider there is better access and development of science and / or technology.

Many questions in the bioethical order are generated in this process of displacement, while the traditional canons of what we know as the doctor-patient relationship are molded, the classic accompaniment of the patients by their relatives, the variability of the environment in which they develop these interventions, creating new scenarios and demanding as a common denominator the existence of conditions that generate a primary value: trust.

For more technical guarantees offered to the service claimant, the value of trust is the essential ethical element to be able to launch the support offered by this international service, which also seeks the best benefit of the patient, involves economic variables and needs to bet with guarantees that Both service and costs correspond to the quality of care.

For this first ingredient we must point out the importance of a corporate and transparent health tourism so that we have the knowledge of those who provide the service and who represent these guarantees.

The ethical bases of these approaches are based on the ethics of responsibility or that which, based on trust, offers serious and responsible scenarios that, due to their generals already demonstrated, make a difference with other proposals of the same meaning, but generate more doubts.

We know the risks of some transplants, of proposals for the application of stem cells, of offers related to beauty, aesthetics, to plastic, of which there are many anecdotes in which unscrupulous hands have managed to make networks that disadvantage the desired objectives , making mercurial interests prevail.

For this reason, bioethics must be a true bridge between intentions and needs, the value of trust, a link and the ethics of responsibility, a norm that provides from the beginning of the technical proposals to the outcome of the processes, taking Keep in mind that the patient is a foreigner in vulnerable conditions and his only ally is the doctor and the support platform that accompanies him.

Only by trusting can these events be loaded with questions and ignorance. The bioethics committees, the bioethics consultants, have to be the second general and local allies in each of these processes, to give a moral foundation that allows to obtain a solidary construction of the value of trust and serve as a counterpart in the support of the patients who come in the search for new health alternatives.