Beauty from Afar

Navigating through a book is easier than navigating through a blog of the book, in that there are fewer options and they are all obvious. If you have the book in your hand, you can open it and read from beginning to end; or find a chapter that interests you; or simply pick a page at random.

A blog is more complicated. Even if you start on the first page, which is by no means a sure thing, all that you know with reasonable certainty is that you are reading the author’s most recent thoughts. If you want to read the book as it was written, and follow along with updates and comments, It seems to me that the best thing to have is an old-fashioned Table of Contents, accessible from every page.

Here is the original ToC, which I’ll link up as I go (unless I come up with a better way.)

C O N T E N T S

Foreword by John J. Corey, M.D.

Author s Note

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Seeking Beauty from Afar: How I Got My Smile Back
Stumbling upon an open secret

(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 …

(2) Comparing Quality, Comparing Costs

Why care abroad is just as good as in the United States, and
why it is so much less expensive than in the United States and Europe

(3) A Brief and Selective History of Medical Tourism

A (necessarily) brief history of traveling for health care

(4) You’re Going Abroad for…What!?

The most common cosmetic and other surgical procedures that lure people overseas

(5) Research, Research, Research

How a consumer should do his or her homework when considering traveling abroad for surgery

(6) There and Back Again

Travel considerations: What a medical tourist needs to know for a successful journey

(7) Brazil; State of the Art in Aesthetic Makeovers

Meeting Dr. Fabio and the FrankenBarbies

(8) Costa Rica: The Beverly Hills of Central America?

Of 20/20 hindsight, recovery retreats and a cottage industry growing up

(9) Mexico: Going South of the Border

Truth and myth, south of the border

(10) The Far East: The New “Cutting Edge” in Medical Tourism

The Miracle at Bumrungrad, India plays catch-up and Malaysia wants to augment business

(11) Pick a Country…Any Country

South Africa, Eastern Europe and Everywhere Else … Surgeon and Safari? Yes, really. And: The New EU.

(12) Future Shock?

Permanent health care abroad? Where will it all end, or does it?

Afterword
By Curtis J. Schroeder, Group CEO, Bumrungrad International, Bangkok, Thailand

***

Path to Publication

Beauty from Afar evolved from a lengthy magazine article I did in 2004, about my own trip to the dentist in Costa Rica. That article, written for the Hartford Courant Sunday magazine, Northeast, is available online at:

http://www.tftb.com/beautyfromafar

I do not know if I will ever, ever again get the opportunity to write a magazine story that is 10,000 words long; that is not the direction that publishing is going. And I wish I could have used the whole article as introduction to Beauty from Afar … but the article was deemed too long to be a book chapter!

What did I learn from that? “Long is good, if you can do it.” There have been countless news stories and articles about medical tourism since I wrote that piece in 2004, almost all of which are written in formulaic journalism, or are straight How-To,  Self-Help articles. I still like mine best. Stylistically, it gives a hint of how I approached Beauty from Afar.

I’m Jeff Schult. I wrote Beauty from Afar: A Medical Tourist’s Guide to Affordable and Quality Cosmetic Care Outside the U.S. in 2005 and 2006; it was published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, an imprint of Abrams Books, New York, N.Y., in July 2006. BFA, as I came to call it for short, was the first book about medical travel and tourism published in the United States. I became known as something of an expert on the subject of medical travel and made a small career out of that. The book sold thousands of copies.

Unfortunately, it did not sell the tens of thousands of copies that might have earned it a second printing and, in July 2009, the rights to the book reverted to me. I have no regrets. I did a good job on the book and therefore, most likely, will get to write another one — and I am working on that.

In the meantime, however — what to do with BFA? You can still buy the book itself online, new or used … but it will become increasingly unavailable as time goes on. The logical thing to do is to make it available as an e-book, and that I will do.

For now (Jan. 2013) about the first third of the book is online here. Eventually, the full text of Beauty from Afar will become available, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, on this web site. This way, I can comment on it myself and update where necessary. Though I think the book holds up well over time, inevitably I will have more to say.

Here is what I had to say when the book was first published:

Since I wrote the book, I have consulted for various medical travel companies both in the U.S. and abroad; I was editor of a medical travel newsletter;  and I have conceived, executed and written web sites and blogs for medical travel companies and web sites. I am webmaster and editor of the Prisma Dental blog for my Costa Rican dentists, and their site has become the most trafficked site of any dental practitioner in the world, according to Alexa rankings.

I am available for work. I’m less expensive than you might think, but I’m not cheap.

I expect that this book site will, in time, become one of the most popular sites about medical tourism on the web. I am open to advertising and partnership ideas. You can contact me at:

jss at beautyfromafar dot com.

Beauty from Afar: A Medical Tourist’s Guide to Affordable and Quality Cosmetic Care Outside the U.S. will be going out of print soon, and the rights to the book have reverted to me, the author. This is a good thing, because I plan to offer the book online.

You can look for substantial changes to this web site by later on in the summer.

I’ll be using the blog format, obviously. I am leaning toward offering the entire book online, supporting it with advertising; and also offering an ad-free e-book. I’m interested in the experiences of other authors who have put their books online after regaining the rights from a publisher. Thousands of copies of Beauty from Afar are already in print, and sold; nonetheless, I have learned that most people want to research medical travel and tourism from in front of a computer screen, not from in front of an open book.

In the meantime, I still recommend that people interested in getting affordable major dental work abroad check out the Prisma Dental blog, which I edit. The story of my visit there in 2004 remains at:

http://www.tftb.com/beautyfromafar

If you wish to write to me directly, the email address is jss (@) beautyfromafar (dot) com; or you can use the form at: http://www.jeffschult.com/blog/contact.