本文觀察目前對於醫療觀光產業形成的討論，普遍從市場觀點分析，亦即需求面是因為歐美國家病患無法負擔本國高額醫療費用或等候就醫時間過長；供給面則是開發中國家提供高品質且低費用的醫療服務。本文認為，醫療服務除視為市場商品外，其往往是被習慣化與不容易改變的，可視為是一種社會建構或社會制度。為此，本文將「文化」視為一種社會群體所累積、適應的生活方式，文化差異對於許多社會制度在執行的效果上產生不同的表現與結果，在醫療服務上亦相同。本文透過文獻探討分析醫療觀光產業中，文化對於醫療選擇行為的影響，試圖檢視醫療觀光產業中「醫療」與「文化」的關係。隨著文化在醫療照護領域逐漸受到重視與發生影響力，許多研究發現顯示，具有文化意識與語言能力的醫療專業人員可以提升醫療照護的品質、減少不正確的治療結果、減少醫師對於其他種族或民族病患的偏見。透過訪談數家提供醫療觀光服務的醫院代表，瞭解其對於醫療與文化的觀點，以及台灣推動醫療觀光時，在文化層面的優勢與弱勢。研究發現，當醫療觀光市場面對醫療科技趨於全球化標準與市場價格的激烈競爭時，醫療服務提供者的文化能力在爭取醫療觀光客上扮演具有影響力的角色。

As a market commodity, medical services can be also seen as a social construct or social system. The reason is that patients do often not easy to change their medical behavior and habituation to receive medical treatment. From this perspective, as a special kind of medical service, medical tourism service is not just the physical experience of patients with high-quality medical care abroad, but also psychological and social impact of cultural dimensions.Medical tourism industry is an emerging industry in recent years and both advanced and developing countries are involved in this field. For example, the British patients prefer to India for receiving medical tourism service. American medical tourists always fly to Mexico to receive medical services to reduce culture shock. Also, Japanese patients would like to stay Taiwan for medical treatment. This “culture” as a social group accumulated to meet the lifestyle. In the process of social system implementation, cultural differences produce different effects on the performance and results.Medical services are as well. In particular, the medical tourists unfamiliar with medical environment would face their physical, psychological challenges, especially for sick medical tourists who are sensitive to environmental uncertain factors. Through analysis of this literature review in the medical tourism industry, cultural behavior plays an important role in influencing medical options. Thus, the purpose of this paper attempts to analyze medical and cultural relationship of emergent medical tourism industry. This study analyzed the medical literature through the tourism industry, the culture of the medical tourism market research found that when faced with global standards in medical technology and the market price tends to fierce competition, culture or cultural competence for medical tourists play an invisible but influential role.