19/06/2017
Not by us, but a great piece about dental tourism in Mexico, filling the gap left by lack of affordable dental care in the US. Selected highlights:
Enter Molar City, the dental Shangri-la of the Mexican desert that’s doing what nobody in Washington has done: keeping American mouths healthy and happy at a fraction of the price.
Says Los Algodones Mayor Christian Camacho: “We’re helping the United States take care of the people they are not able to.”
…
“You really need to do your research,” Ure, 61, tells me. “You can get some who don’t know what they’re doing, which happened to me.” Her first procedure here seven years ago didn’t go well — the implants a dentist put in fell apart soon after Ure returned to the US.
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Since Americans first started coming here in the 1980s, Los Algodones has transformed itself from a small border town into a hub for dental and eye care. In addition to the dentists, 150 optometrists and 20 medical doctors work in town, with dozens of pharmacies carrying low-cost prescription medications.
Clinics routinely hire deported Mexicans who spent years speaking English in the United States to work their front desks or as barkers on the street. The state of Baja’s government also stations military personnel in town who speak English as a nod to the thousands of US and Canadian visitors.
…
Bernard Burks, a 67-year-old RV enthusiast and business owner from Sacramento, first came to Molar City a few years ago after hearing stories of its cheap, quality work from the RV scene.
“The RV people know about some places, so I decided to come down,” Burks says.
At first he was skeptical. As a kidney transplant patient, he has to be vigilant about the risk of infections, and the notion that dentists in Mexico were giving clients care equal to or better than in the United States seemed too good to be true.
But he needed major dental work, badly, and even with his insurance, the out-of-pocket costs made getting treatment at home almost impossible. The RV people assured him Molar City was safe.
The biggest draw?
“It’s the price,” Burks says. “It was gonna cost me $12,700 at home for three implants. And they found two root canals I needed, which would have been $1,600 for each root canal at home, plus the crowns.
“I got it all here for $4,200.”
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The law of averages suggests that not all of the 600-plus clinics are safe and of high quality. But many of the dentists in Molar City have either been trained in the US, like Valderrama, or have comparable degrees from accredited universities in Mexico. Part of the reason the costs are significantly lower is that Mexican dentists aren’t saddled with as much college debt as their American counterparts, in part because they begin their training earlier in college and because the government subsidizes higher education in Mexico.
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I then ask Turner if he wants to let people know anything else about the dental care crisis in the United States or Molar City.
“Come to Mexico,” he says, laughing. “It’s beautiful.”
https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/americans-going-to-dentists-in-molar-city-mexico
Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric doesn’t worry the 600 dentists in Los Algodones or the US “dental refugees” they treat, many of whom voted for Trump. “We’re helping the United States take care of the pe
