---
title: "The Travel Doctor: What Elite Travellers Do Differently"
description: A physician who has spent two decades studying what international travel does to human physiology. We looked into what the science shows, what most traveller...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-06-05T13:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-02T09:10:56.478Z
canonical: https://richtravelmagazine.com/article/the-travel-doctor-what-elite-travellers-do-differently
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/anders-jilden-cYrMQA7a3Wc-unsplash.jpg
categories: Smart Travel
content_type: Guide
region: Global
publication: Rich Travel Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

The consultation room is small and deliberately neutral. There are no travel posters. No map covered in pins. No photographs of exotic destinations that might suggest, even subliminally, that this is a room for people who are excited about where they are going rather than people who need to be carefully managed getting there.

Dr. Richard Dawood has been practicing travel medicine in London for over thirty years. He is the author of the 'Travellers' Health' handbook, which is now in its fifth edition, and which has been the standard reference text for travellers and practitioners in the English-speaking world since 1986. He sees patients before they leave — for vaccination advice, antimalarial prescribing, altitude protocols, the careful calibration of medication timing for long-haul travel — and he sees them when they come back unwell, or unwell in ways they don't yet recognise. He has been following the same cohort of travellers — diplomats, executives, royal household staff — for long enough to observe what happens to people who travel consistently and at the limits of what the human body was designed to do.

What he has learned does not much resemble the advice most frequent travellers have absorbed.

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