Chapter 1 Page 1 | Medical Tourism: Here, There and Everywhere
More than 100,000 United States residents leave the country for
cosmetic procedures every year. Where do they go? Wherever they like …
It is April, 2004, and I am having breakfast with a few new friends at Las Cumbres Inn outside San Jose, Costa Rica. Sandy, perhaps 45, a Californian, is nearly recovered from her nips and tucks, and is contemplating having her teeth bleached. “Might as well do it while I’m here,” she mutters, knowing she’ll be heading home in a few days.
Vicki, also forty-something, and a self-described vagabond, wears dark glasses to cover the swelling from the work done on her still-healing eyes. She is a U.S. citizen who has lived frugally but comfortably in a Costa Rican village for most of the past 11 years. She is thinking she is going to need to get a job again, soon.
Nina looks like she had been in a car wreck. She has had a face-lift, a neck lift, a “medium chemical peel,” and perhaps some other “work” that does not fix in my memory. She shows me the estimate she had gotten from a cosmetic surgeon in New York City for the major procedures she wanted. It came to $22,420: $18,000 for the face and neck lift, $2,100 for an operating room fee, $1,320 for post-operative nursing care, and $1,000 for anesthesia. Her entire bill in Costa Rica will come to $5,700, she says. On this morning, she wonders if she will ever again look anything like she had looked before, let alone better or younger. We assure her that she will, and later, we are proven right.
Me? I tell Sandy about my dentists, Josef Cordero, D.D.S., and Telma Rubinstein, D.D.S., childhood sweethearts who went to college and dental school together, got married, and have spent more than 20 years building an international practice. Sandy decides to go with me in the van that day to see if they can squeeze her in for a teeth bleaching.
They can. We all feel pretty smart, in the way people do who have a shared secret.
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