South Africa can win only a small share of the $6.8 trillion (about R112 trillion) global wellness economy, and should stop trying to compete with Asia on price, according to Dr Anushka Reddy, medical doctor and founder of Vivari, a Johannesburg-based medical wellness and longevity facility.
In a written interview with Business Explainer, Reddy said most of the global figure, measured by the Global Wellness Institute, is spent by people in their home countries on beauty, nutrition and fitness, and that close to 90% of it sits in North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe. “That money does not travel,” she said. “What South Africa can compete for is the mobile slice: people who will cross a border for care, a programme or an experience.”
She identified three segments where she said the country’s advantages are structural, rather than high-volume elective surgery, where Thailand and Turkey dominate.
| Segment | Why South Africa can compete, according to Reddy |
|---|---|
| Medically supervised wellness programmes | Clinical assessment combined with space, climate, nature and a time zone that suits Europe |
| Executive and corporate health | Multinationals and regional headquarters on the continent currently send leaders to Dubai or Europe |
| African regional patients | Johannesburg is closer, more familiar and more affordable for many families in SADC and beyond |
On price, Reddy said South Africa sits in the middle: generally cheaper than Dubai and far cheaper than the United States or United Kingdom, but rarely able to match Thailand or Turkey on routine procedures. “We should stop trying to win on price alone,” she said. She listed the country’s strengths as the quality of its clinical training, English as a common language, a favourable time zone for European patients, and a currency that gives visitors value.
The larger weakness, she said, is coordination. Competing destinations have treated medical tourism as a national strategy, with government-backed promotion, recognised standards for facilitators and easy entry. “We have left it to individual providers,” she said. She also pointed to perceptions of safety and limited, expensive direct air connections, which she said the private sector cannot fix alone.
Reddy welcomed the Electronic Travel Authorisation introduced by the Department of Home Affairs in August, calling it a genuine step forward. She said the next step should be a defined visa route for patients and an accompanying family member, with a length of stay that allows for recovery. She also called for a national accreditation standard for providers and for the agents who sell treatment to international patients, noting that anyone can currently call themselves a medical tourism agent. She urged insurers to make complication and medical-travel cover routine, and said the country does not reliably count how many medical travellers arrive, what they spend or where they come from. “We cannot build a strategy around a market we do not measure,” she said.
Reddy, who built her career in aesthetic medicine, added longevity medicine after certifying through the Geneva College of Longevity Science. She said many patients seeking cosmetic treatment are also dealing with poor sleep, chronic stress, hormonal change or metabolic problems, which often show in the skin before they appear in a blood test. At Vivari, the aesthetic clinic and its Longevity Institute share one clinical team and one medical record.
Combining medicine with hospitality, she said, makes sense because preventive medicine takes time that a short consultation cannot provide. Vivari offers stays of three to ten nights built around diagnostic testing. The challenges include operating under two regulatory systems, keeping patient information out of ordinary hotel systems to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act, and aligning two cultures. “Hospitality is trained to say yes to the guest,” she said. “Clinicians are sometimes obliged to say ‘not yet’ or ‘not for you’.”
On the growth of longevity clinics, Reddy said patients should ask any provider what it will measure before treatment, what it will re-measure afterwards, how strong the evidence is in humans, and which registered clinician is accountable. She warned against promises to “reverse ageing” and said regulators should focus on wellness businesses that make medical claims without medical accountability, rather than writing new rules.
She said companies sending executives on medically led programmes are buying risk reduction, but cautioned against providers promising a precise financial return. Employers, she said, should receive only anonymised, aggregated data, never an individual’s clinical results.
The biggest risk for international patients, Reddy said, comes when they return home with a report their own doctor did not request. Vivari identifies each patient’s home doctor at intake and sends them a structured clinical summary. “If a treatment’s complications could only be managed safely by us,” she said, “it may not be right for a patient flying home.”