The book involving medical tourism in India and the efforts of the American hospital corporations to sabotage it was preceded by a Web series bearing the same name.

Cook, an eye surgeon, was raised in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Columbia University School of Medicine, he completed his postgraduate medical training at Harvard University.

In his early professional years, the Cousteau Society recruited Cook to run its blood-gas lab in France. Intrigued by diving, he went on to become an aquanaut with the United States Navy Seals.

In an exclusive interview, Dr Cook, 68, not only speaks about his mission as a popular writer but also about his three-week-long visit to India, and what he learned from it.

Plenty of bad things happen to American patients in a New Delhi hospital but this book is more about the mess the American healthcare system is in and how greed drives powerful people to go to extreme to keep their businesses going, he says.

You've been writing about controversial medical developments ever since Coma, three decades ago. Why did you choose medical tourism as the focus for your new novel?

Medical tourism is a rapidly growing phenomenon. I believe it is a negative trend despite the generally high quality of care patients receive in countries such as India. There are worrying factors. If there are complications -- and there will be complications -- patients have no legal recourse and very little medical recourse. It is a tragedy that the United States has such a lousy healthcare system that it pushes people to go offshore.

Text: Arthur J Pais | Photographs: Stills from Foreign Body

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