Beauty from Afar

I don’t know anyone who likes to refer to “Medical Tourism” as “Medical Tourism.” Funny, huh? But someone came up with it in the 1990s, and we are still about half-stuck with it. Increasingly, people in the business prefer the reference “medical travel,” which doesn’t have the the assumed frivolity of “tourism” as baggage.

Chapter 3 Page 4 | Origins of  the term “Medical Tourism” (cont.)

The earliest references I found for the phrase “Medical Tourism” were in 1998, as noted in today’s segment.

Our little history lesson continues today with a segment about how a plastic surgeon in Costa Rica started marketing to the U.S. market in the early 1980s; and continues with a discussion of a somewhat prescient World Bank report on prospects for health tourism exports in the Caribbean.

Chapter 3 Page 3 | Build It, and They Will Come …

I thought I’d be sailing through Chapter 3 easily but have had a lot of reformatting to do from the version of Beauty from Afar from which I am working … which I have now realized is probably the penultimate digital copy. Aaaaiiieee! An alert reader, Debbie, caught a mistake the other day in which I had named someone other than Alexandre Dumas as author of The Three Musketeers. Fortunately, the error was fixed before the book was printed. I do remember how I felt when I found the mistake initially — after I’d “finished” writing the book and after it had been twice edited. I felt both as though I’d dodged a bullet and as though I was nearly too stupid to live.

There are a couple of minor errors in the paper version of Beauty from Afar. It is nice to have the opportunity to fix them.

I used to be appalled when I found typos or any kind of mistakes in books. How could it happen? Well — now I know the answer. It can happen in all sorts of ways. Human beings are involved. With Beauty from Afar, they mostly happened because I was allowed to fuss with and add things right up until the last second — as though we were producing a newspaper story instead of a book. Overall, I think the additions and last-minute changes made for a better book … but there is a tradeoff. Typos, however minor, are just disheartening.

In Beauty from Afar, I refer to Dr. Prof.  Ivo Pitanguy of Brazil as perhaps the father of both modern cosmetic surgery and of medical tourism.

Chapter 3 Page 2 | The Pioneers

I had originally hoped the Dr. Pitanguy would write the foreword for my book, but that wasn’t going to happen without my taking a trip to Brazil that I wasn’t able to take on my budget at the time. However, his office, in the person of Pitanguy’s then-assistant, Henrique N. Radwanski, M.D., was generous with time and information.

Traveling for medical care isn’t new. Looking for historical examples was kind of fun. Starting Chapter 3 with a quote from Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers is maybe a little pretentious to some people, but I hope others were as mildly amused as I was.

Chapter 3 Page 1 |  A Brief and Selective History of Medical Tourism

I promise, Chapter 3 moves along quickly. It runs from pages 63 to 72 in the bound version of Beauty from Afar … so I’d guess it will all be “live” by the end of the week.

By now, anyone reading along has probably figured out that I had no intention of writing what might have amounted to a directory of international medical services. Others, most notably Josef Woodman with his Patients Beyond Borders series of guides, have ably provided health care consumers with more traditional formats.

I wanted to provide more of a broad overview, a way of thinking about medical travel and tourism. Beauty from Afar, I thought, would take readers to the point where they could make educated decisions about where they might go as medical travelers without telling them where to go. As choices have expanded over the past five years, I am glad that other books have come along. There are now a number of medical travel books; there are magazines; there are newsletters; there are associations.

There were none of those things when I was first researching and writing Beauty from Afar in 2004 — 2005. Things have moved right along.

Prices for cosmetic surgery vary widely based on a number of factors, as I point out in the concluding segment of Beauty from Afar‘s Chapter 2:

Chapter 2 Page 9 | Prices in the United States and Abroad

Being a surgeon, particularly being a surgeon for uninsured, elective procedures, is a business, wherever one is located.  And the global recession has had an impact on the business of cosmetic surgery. This report is from January 2009, but I rather doubt that cosmetic surgery is less recession-proof than the rest of the economy:

Cosmetic surgeons suffer recession, says new survey

Well-established practices are weathering the storm. Not-so-well established practices are not, and some are not surviving.

Anywhere in between? Whether in the U.S. or abroad, cosmetic surgeons are getting more creative about marketing to patients and that means, often, that patients have some bargaining power when it comes to price.

No sane person chooses a surgeon solely on the basis of price. But discounts can be attractive.

That finishes up Chapter 2, hooray! I have no idea if anyone is following along day by day, but the visitor count has been rising steadily. On to Chapter 3 … which is a brief history of medical tourism.

Today’s so-called “page” is just three paragraphs. That is the way it worked out with the subheads from the original book.

Chapter 2 Page 8 | If You Can’t Beat Them …

I excerpted this aside from a lengthier interview with Oscar Suarez, M.D. in his office at CIMA Hospital, and I quote him more extensively later in the book. I don’t know if he is still head of the Department of Plastic Surgery at CIMA but it is evident that his practice is thriving. That is one of the problems with including official titles in books — people move on from where they were.

When I first walked into the waiting area of Dr. Suarez’s office, his assistant asked me what procedures I was interested in … and it was the first time anyone ever suggested I might need (or at least want) cosmetic surgery. I’m sure it was SOP for the office and no psychological harm was intended. For the record — at 53, I’m unmodified, other than my teeth.