Finance is the main driving force
Every year, millions of Americans travel to Mexico and other countries in the form of medical tourism or medical tourism, according to the New York Times. The National Foreign Trade Bank in Mexico estimated that the medical tourism industry was worth 5 billion USD before suffering losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For patients, the driving force for medical tourism is often finance. Many people go abroad to buy pharmaceuticals at prices much lower than in the US. Others, especially Americans and Canads, have traveled for surgery or treatment over the past two decades.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that dental care, surgery, reproductive treatment, organ and tissue transplants and cancer treatment are popular treatments for people who go abroad to treat.
Daniel Beland, a political science professor at McGill University, a health policy researcher, said that self- precision procedures are a key component of medical tourism.
In 2016, the CDC surveyed more than 93,000 people; among those who left the US for medical tourism the previous year and found Mexico as the most popular destination.
However, treatment travel is largely uncontrolled and the outcome or scope of treatments for Americans in Mexico is almost unlockable.
There are actually very few regulations, said David G. Vequist IV, director of the Medical Tourism Research Center in San Antonio, Texas.
3-U-shaped industry
Its hard to find solid data on treatment tourism, says Valorie Crooks, a geography professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who has been researching medical tourism for more than a decade. She called this industry the three Us, meaning uncescored, un traceable, uncontrolled.
Most of the Mexico hospitals that Americans treat are private hospitals and do not report data to the federal government.
Josef Woodman - CEO of Patients beyond borders, a unit that acts as an international medical tourism consultancy agency and guides patients who want to receive treatment abroad - estimates that each year, about 1.2 million Americans travel to Mexico to undergo medical procedures.
After treatment travel decreased during the pandemic, the number of people seeking treatment in Mexico increased dramatically after being vaccinated. After the first vaccination, people flocked, he said.
Mr. Woodman pointed out that complex dental treatments such as tooth decay, porcelain patching and entire mouth cavity repair are one of the most popular methods. The city of Los Algodones in Mexico, near the US border between California and Arizona, is known as the Molar City because it serves this market.
According to 30, Rodriguez, a doctoral student in medical geography at the University of Brazil, Brazil, the most popular destinations tend to be states of Mexico along the border, such as Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, or famous coastal urban states such as Baja California Sur and Quintana Roo.
Having interviewed hundreds of people in the medical tourism industry in Los Algodones for their master's thesis, logistics Rodriguez found that Baja California Sur is the state with the most medical tourism.
Why is medical tourism booming?
Professor Crooks shares that because the cost of operating a clinic or healthcare center in Mexico is much lower, patients often have to pay less than performing the same procedure in the US.
A study of more than 400 people near the US-Mexico border on medical travel found that behind behind behind-the-scenes, behind-the-scenes, behind-the-scenes travel is the deciding factor.
Andrea Miller, a clinical pharmacian in Arizona and the head of the study, was impressed by the popularity of ads and the infrastructure for healthcare in a border town in Mexico. "You look down at the street and see a pharmacy, then a pharmacy, an eye clinic, a dental clinic, a pharmacy, and a dental clinic" - she said.
Professor Crooks commented that some patients also go abroad to avoid leniency and limitations that hinder their procedures in their home country.
You can be too young or too old for Orthopedic surgery; you can be too small or too big for weight loss surgery. Then you find a surgeon in another country who is willing to treat you," she pointed out.
In addition, there are also people who travel to treat their illnesses to perform procedures that are considered illegal at their place of residence, including abortion.
Researcher Rodriguez also found that more people travel to treat their illnesses because they wanted to seek more personalized care and the doctor gave them more time.
