What about SFU would make a Harvard Law professor jealous? The President’s Dream Colloquium, apparently.
Professor Glenn Cohen of Harvard University conceded this just before delivering the final lecture in this semester’s President’s Dream Colloquium: Traveling for Health. The series examined the ways that the movement of doctors, medical volunteers, patients, and even organs affect healthcare worldwide.
The Dream Colloquium has seen a diverse range of topics for graduate and undergraduate students since its inception in 2012. Ranging from entrepreneurship to civil disobedience, the goal is to create a space where students can be engaged with unique topics they might not otherwise have access to.
Speakers are brought in every other week to give lectures on different facets of the topic, and students have the chance to meet with them afterwards. The topic for spring 2016 will be Engaging Big Data.
On Friday night, Cohen unpacked some of the ethical issues associated with health tourism. Cohen has extensive experience in this area, with many papers under his belt, as well as his 2014 book, Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics.
Speaking to the dark side of transplant tourism, Cohen gave the example of countries like Bangladesh and India where low income citizens sometimes must sell their organs. The demand for kidneys in particular has increased due to an aging population and the high prevalence of diabetes.
Cohen brought up the question of whether selling your own organs should ever be allowed. He didn’t provide a direct answer, saying instead, “You have a role in determining the rules in your country.”
However far away these desperate situations may seem, they place a very real pressure on the Canadian health care system. People who have transplant operations using illegally purchased organs are much more likely to experience complications at home, taking up substantial medical resources in Canada while they recover.
The exact figures on the extent of this kind of medical tourism in Canada are hard to come by said Cohen. He elaborated, “We don’t know very much about the numbers; anybody that tells you that they do is probably not being rigorous enough.”
For accurate information on the realities of transplant tourism, Cohen has high praise for SFU researchers, saying that “the SFU health geography/medical tourism research group is terrific.” The website offers first-hand accounts of medical tourism and questions that people should ask themselves before going abroad for medical treatment.
When asked about what Canadians could do to help prevent patients from buying organs abroad, Cohen had simple advice.
“In some ways the most tangible thing you can [do. . .] would actually be to donate a kidney or to participate in the donor system.”
