Chapter 2 Page 3 | A warning lives on, mostly unheeded
The costs for common cosmetic surgery procedures in the Dominican Republic are roughly 40 to 70 percent less than they are in the United States. Dominican surgeons, particularly members of the Society of Plastic Surgery, felt that they were under assault by the U.S. media, by U.S. doctors, and by U.S. politicians because of their success in attracting U.S. patients. They thought that their skill and medical facilities had been unfairly maligned.
Their suspicions were raised by the fact that their statement went unreported in The New York Times or anywhere in the United States and that the initial story lived on in news releases and through references in other stories. As of January 2006, the U.S. State Department was still posting a warning on its travel advisory for the Dominican Republic:
The U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are aware of several cases in which U.S. citizens experienced serious complications or died following elective (cosmetic) surgery in the Dominican Republic. The CDC’s Web site contains further information for all patients seeking elective surgery overseas at http://www.cdc.gov/travel/other/elective_surgery_2004.htm.
Patients considering travel to the Dominican Republic for cosmetic surgery may also wish to contact the Dominican Society of Plastic Surgery (tel. 809-688-8451) to verify the training, qualifications, and reputation of specific doctors.
A similar report posted on the CDC’s Web site had been taken down months before, but the scare lived on. I assumed that business for plastic surgeons in the Dominican Republic had to have gone down the tubes. Negative publicity is bad enough when it involves a single doctor but the Times’ story was directed at the cosmetic surgeons and doctors of an entire country! What damage did it do to the country’s cosmetic tourism business? Surely, I thought, it had slowed to a trickle.
Not so.
If anything, business is better, Roberto Guerrero, M.D., of Santo Domingo told me a year after the story was published. Dr. Guerrero is a plastic surgeon who trained under Brazil’s Ivo Pitanguy, M.D.; it is a credential most U.S. plastic surgeons would love to have. “People heard more about us, about what we do. If anything, the story helped us.”
Dr. Guerrero, in a lengthy phone interview, defended the quality of surgery and the facilities available in the Dominican Republic. There are roughly 60 board-certified surgeons, and the requirements for certification are every bit as stringent as in the United States.
“The infections — they can happen anywhere. They happen in the U.S.,” he said. “We have doctors here who are not board-certified, who do cosmetic procedures … and you have that in the U.S. as well.”
But by then, Dr. Guerrero was telling me what I already knew — that there are supremely talented cosmetic and aesthetic surgeons working in the Dominican Republic in modern facilities, just as there are in Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Mexico, and, of course, in the United States, and around the rest of the world. Like one woman told the Times: “There are good and bad doctors everywhere.”
(Author’s note: The CDC Internet page cited above no longer exists in 2009. However, the State Department warning about cosmetic surgery is still up, here; and the dated CDC report lives on, here — five years later. My guess is that it is a bureaucratic nightmare to get the State Department to remove such information.)
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