A recent case study by doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York examined the ethical issues posed by transplant tourism, an offshoot of medical tourism, which focuses solely on transplantation surgery. Many American transplant professionals frown on the practice of transplant tourism where patients travel to countries such as China, India, and the Philippines for their transplantation. These transplant tourists may be subject to sub-standard surgical techniques, poor organ matching, unhealthy donors, and post transplant infections, prompting U.S. health care institutions to refuse treatment of these patients upon return to the U.S. Medical associations have responded with transplant tourism policies and guidelines to advise clinicians on the ethics of caring for transplant tourists. Full details of the study appear in the February issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD ... Read more »