Searching for therapies, seeking for hope: transnational cancer care in Asia

This paper is about transnational cancer care in Asia. People with terminal
diseases such as cancer increasingly escape devastating prognosis of
their local regimes of clinical diagnostic truth by traveling to destinations
where medicine is more advanced, yet affordable for them, and hence
offers a broader scope for hope. The paper suggests that transnational
cancer care provides an instructive case of the enormous geographical
disparities in the availability of therapies and how this, combined with
economies of hope and the marketization of health care, affects patients
and their family caregivers. The primary contribution of the paper is the
introduction of the concept of relational subjectivities to the health
mobilities literature. The findings presented proof that the concept
provides a fruitful analytical lens, yielding not only fresh empirical
insights but prompting re-conceptualizations of medical travel itself as
hopeful, yet risky transnational acts of family care.