It’s hard not to be a little pleased with myself, sometimes, as I slog through my own four-year-old prose. It looks as though I managed to not allow myself to be blinded by the sun bouncing off the shiny newness of medical tourism. I was cautious and felt my way. There’s not a lot of money in that but smugness, years later, is worth something.
I used the *T* Word — Trend — in the segment of Beauty from Afar that I just posted. Editors just love trends. They love to turn good stories into stories about trends. And I am a little guilty there — maybe even a lot guilty. After all, I took a story about going to Costa Rica for major dental work and turned it into a story about lots of people going every-damn-place for medical care. I mean, I wanted a book contract and I knew I had to … extrapolate.
But I was careful. In today’s segment:
Chapter 1 Page 8 | Tip of the Iceberg — and a Trend
… I said what a lot of people have been saying …
“One can imagine that 10 years from now, the lion’s share of the U.S. cosmetic and other elective surgery businesses will be offshore; that U.S. insurers and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) will be putting a hefty percentage of nonemergency-care patients with expensive treatment or surgical needs on airplanes out of the country rather than sending them to local doctors, hospitals, and surgeons.”
But had the smarts to walk away:
“This is a highly exaggerated scenario.”
(Pats self on back. Hey, I have to come up with some motivation to do this every day.)
