Plastic surgery in Mexico is safe if you do your homework

Last week Dateline NBC did a story on what is sometimes referred to as plastic surgery tourism or lipo-tourism. In other words, what I have talked about in the past as plastic surgery overseas. While the program did reconfirm some of the things that I have mentioned in my previous article (Caution when having plastic surgery overseas), Victoria Corderi tried to make a big story out of stories of essentially four women who got bad plastic surgery from just one doctor in the Dominican Republic.

Let me first restate what the program talked about if you want to take advantage of extremely lower prices for plastic surgery overseas:

1. Like anything else, "Buyers beware." This is true overseas, for plastic surgery, and it is equally true for even the United States. The stories of horrible plastic surgeons and the damage that they have done to plastic surgery patients here in the US are heartbreaking. So do your research prior to picking a surgeon whether in the US or overseas.
2. Remember that plastic surgery is surgery. It is a medical procedure in which an anaestheologist will administer anaesthesia and a surgeon will literally open your body. Anything can go wrong at any point of time.
3. Low cost comes at a price. While most of the costs overseas are lower because the cost of doing business is low and doctors in many countries do not spend as much money on insurance as Americans doctors do (and pass on these savings to patients), hygiene and safety may also be compromised by some unscrupulous surgeons. Surgeons may reuse things that should be thrown away. They may not have/use all the sophisticated equipment available. In many cases, they are not even aware of the latest technologies and procedures.
4. The reason most American surgeons do a good job is that we have a legal system in place. The surgeons are afraid of being sued. No wonder it raises the cost of healthcare in the US, but it also keeps them under check. I have often seen American women pushing the doctors to take out more fat during liposuction or tummy tuck procedure and the doctor saying no simply because it is too risky. A doctor overseas may agree to your request since he wants the money and is not afraid of being sued. The legal system in many countries is broken.

But is plastic surgery overseas really that bad?

Not really. Dateline NBC reported that just 1,000 Americans have surgery there each year and that is a very small percentage (9.2 million cosmetic surgery and 1.7 million surgical procedures were performed in 2004 in the US). As Stone Phillips said, most people do just fine even if they go overseas. But the media needs a story and that is what Dateline did. They took four cases and made it appear as if the world was coming to an end because some women got hurt in the Dominican Republic.

While I am myself skeptical of third-world countries for medical procedures and I would not go unless I could trust the doctor/surgeon, there are other options for low-cost surgery overseas. As I said in the past, you can go to Mexico or Canada where the clinics are located purely for strategic reasons (lower cost of doing business). All of these doctors could very well be in the US but choose to be in Mexico or Canada to increase their cost competitiveness. You can also go to developed countries like Spain where the cost is not as low as Mexico but still much lower than that in the US. In a developed country, you are guaranteed a higher level of patient care, comparable or even better sometimes than what you receive here at home.

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