The Discourse of Distant Care: A Multimodal and Pragmatic Analysis of Medical Tourism Marketing and Its Sustainable Paradox

This study explores the discursive construction of sustainability in the rapidly growing medical tourism sector. It investigates the pragmatic and multimodal strategies used to align the potentially contradictory concepts of luxury healthcare travel and ecological or social responsibility. Grounded in Multimodal Discourse Analysis and theories of Place Branding, the research examines textual and visual content from hospital websites, medical broker portals, and destination marketing materials for five key medical tourism hubs. The methodology employs a three-part analytical framework focusing on Interdiscursivity (blending of medical, tourism, and sustainability discourses), Spatio-Social Representation (how places and people are framed), and Pragmatic Politeness Strategies (addressing patient-tourist desires). Major findings reveal a prevalent strategy of green compartmentalization, where environmental claims are restricted to peripheral hotel features such as eco-linen, while the carbon-intensive travel core is linguistically backgrounded. Destinations are branded through a rhetoric of seamless efficiency, combining medical authority with touristic allure, while host communities are largely erased or framed as a passive service backdrop. The patient-tourist is addressed with exclusive, deferential politeness, constructing a hyper-consumer subject. The study concludes that current medical tourism discourse systematically obscures its socio-ecological footprint, advocating for mandatory discursive integration of sustainability metrics, ethical codes of conduct centering host communities, and a reorientation towards a responsible mobility paradigm that transparently accounts for the costs of cross-border care.