Dr. Carlos A. Centeno blog post by Universal PR. Team.
Quoted from http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Medical+tourists+beware/3465543/story.html:
Medical tourism is one of those benign phrases that conjures up happy thoughts of a little liposuction while lolling about on a beach in some exotic port.
Nobody expects New Delhi-metallo-beta-lactamase, the newest so-called superbug as a souvenir. Referred to as NDM-1, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria contains a gene that resists treatment by medicine’s most powerful drugs. It has already killed one Belgian man while two Canadians – one in Alberta, the other in British Columbia who returned home from their medical adventure unwittingly carrying NDM-1 – were successfully treated.
Experts are predicting a 10-year-window before the bacteria becomes resistant to all treatment, a sort of medical End-of-Days firestorm. The British medical journal, The Lancet, reported 37 cases of the infection so far, most picked up after medical procedures on the Indian subcontinent. With the kind of speed and hot denials seen when any lucrative business is threatened with bad publicity, officials in India are flatly denying any link and just as vehemently objecting to the gene being named for the capital city of India.
It is so easy to blame a bacteria or a virus with problems associated to plastic surgery outside of the United States as if they only happened abroad. It seems like there is a campaign that tries to stimulate a fear to travel and have health services provided. One explanation is that as medical tourism becomes more and more popular, health insurance companies in the US will have to continue to adapt to the ever changing market.
Specifically with cosmetic and plastic surgery, there is a system problem associated to cost. The United States has made medical services prohibited to most patients since the insurance for those services needs to be so high. However, for the most part, most insurance companies don’t cover procedures that are aesthetic in nature. In other words, you pay for insurance that will never serve its purpose. In the event that you decide that you need plastic surgery, the insurance will not cover. So why even pay for it in the first place right? That is the dilema that plastic surgeons across the United States are facing.
In terms of patients, they simply want quality health services at an affordable price. By quality they seek not only a qualified surgeon but also the post-operation care. Since health care services have become so expensive in the US, its easy to see how emerging economies have been able to compete very easily in the quality department. In terms of affordable price, its obvious that countries like Costa Rica sustain an economy that allows surgery clinics to charge much less for high quality services.
In other words, what is there to do to stop the fast propagation of patients traveling outside of the US for plastic surgery services? Simple, try to inflect fear in the minds of those potential patients.
If you are looking for quality plastic surgery services in Costa Rica, please contact Universal today. Dr. Carlos Centeno and his crew can provide you with all the information you need to make the best decision.