Plastic Surgery Medical Tourism

Medical tourism is very popular for cosmetic surgery. I have had a few prospective patients who visited my office for a consultation then ultimately decide to go with a cheaper option in the Caribbean or South America, most often the Dominican Republic, or Colombia. It is quite popular for patients to go to these countries for breast and body procedures or for combinations of procedures that doctors in the United States may not be willing to perform due to concerns over safety. Common procedures that patients seek to undergo are: buttock augmentation, liposuction, tummy tuck, breast augmentation, and mommy makeover surgery. In my professional opinion, patients would be better served by staying in the United States.

There are periodic reports of deaths in these international locations during what would otherwise be routine cosmetic surgery procedures. A few example news reports of very unfortunate, and preventable, deaths are located here, here, and here. I was also interviewed on News 4 on the topic a couple of years ago when a young woman died on the operating table during a very common cosmetic surgery procedure in the Dominican Republic. It is difficult to determine if practitioners outside the United States even have relevant training. Some prospective patients have said “But I saw so and so on Instagram; they have 100,000 followers!” Unfortunately, this does not signify a level of expertise or safety commensurate with the United States. This practitioner may only be publicizing their “good” results, and much of plastic surgical training focuses on learning the correct sequence of decisions in the case of unexpected events intraoperatively. Moreover, plastic surgery emergency room calls involve me having to treat complications from foreign plastic surgery after the patient returns home.

Aesthetic plastic surgery procedures, including those in the articles linked above, are overwhelmingly safe when performed in the United States by a board-certified plastic surgeon although many of them involve significant surgery. I had 7 years of surgical training after medical school in both general surgery and plastic surgery in the best healthcare system in the world before operating on patients without oversight.

Your body is a precious commodity, and I would recommend you not seek the cheapest price available. Treat your body well!