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Americans treated in Mexico
in 2024, per Border Report | 1.3M+ |
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Foreign patients in Korea
in 2025, up 72% in a year | 2.01M |
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Patients worldwide
per year, Patients Beyond Borders estimate | 21M+ |
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| She paid a quarter of her quote in Tijuana |
| Huntington Beach, California. |
| Danielle Sokol is a 55-year-old chiropractor there, and she has no dental insurance. |
| So when her mouth needed a whole run of work, extractions included, the local estimate was hers to cover in full. |
| She didn’t pay it. |
| Instead, she took the work south to Tijuana, where the bill came to about a quarter of what she’d been quoted at home. |
| In other words, for every $4 the dentist near home wanted, she spent about $1. |
| Along the way she found a biologic dentist, the kind who treats teeth as part of the whole body. |
| And the bedside manner? |
| “They treated me like a princess. I’m serious,” she told the California Health Report this summer. |
| She has plenty of company. UCLA public health professor Arturo Vargas Bustamante says cost drives 60–70% of these border trips, mostly for people with no insurance or coverage so thin they save it for emergencies. |
| Meanwhile, about four miles from the border in Tijuana’s Aviación district, Dr. Sergio Herrera co-owns an implant practice called ProDent. (He isn’t Danielle’s dentist, but his prices are public, which makes him useful here.) |
| Eighty percent of his patients are over 50, and two-thirds of those come from the US. Interesting… |
| A single implant at ProDent starts at $1,700, and that price covers the titanium post, the zirconia crown, the abutment, the X-rays and the follow-up visits. |
| Back home, the average single implant runs about $4,500. |
| Single dental implant |
| 🇺🇸 US average |
| $4,500 |
| ↓ |
| 🇲🇽 Tijuana, crown included |
| $1,700 |
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| | | “They treated me like a princess. I’m serious.” | | Danielle Sokol, Huntington Beach, CA |
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| Getting there is the cheap part. |
| ProDent’s partner shuttle charges $20 each way from the border, and the City Express Plus five minutes away runs $90 a night (tacos extra, though maybe not the same afternoon). |
| Plan on two visits a few months apart (the crown usually goes on once the implant heals), so four shuttle rides and a night each trip bring the whole thing to about $1,960. |
| And if $1,700 still stings, the clinic offers Affirm payment plans. Spread over twelve months, that’s about $142 a month before interest. |
| Is it risk-free? Not even close. |
| The same columnist spoke with a 73-year-old woman from Laguna Woods whose husband was left with crumbling temporary veneers by a Los Algodones dentist, and the fix back home cost… $60,000. |
| So do the boring homework before you hand over a deposit: check the dentist’s Mexican license, the implant brand and the written quote, and ask who handles it if something goes wrong. (A dental office like ProDent isn’t a JCI-accredited hospital, so the checking falls to you.) |
| Will more Americans follow Danielle south? I have no idea. But a quarter of the price is hard to argue with. |
| I know which way I’d drive. |
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| YeahSmile, Cancún |
| Under-eye fillers · August 2026 · bookimed.com |
| Marcell traveled from the US to YeahSmile in Cancún for under-eye filler. The clinic opened in 2021 and reports about 460 patients a year. |
| The planning went smoothly, and Marcell gives the coordinator most of the credit for handling everything from transport and the hotel to restaurants and shopping. The doctor worked slowly and carefully, checking symmetry along the way. When the review went up, it was still too early to judge the final result. |
| One heads-up: most of the staff spoke English, but the doctor didn’t, so the nursing staff translated. Marcell calls that a personal preference rather than a problem, and plans to learn conversational Spanish before going back. |
| The money tips are the useful part. Filler is priced per syringe, so the final bill is settled on site (Bookimed’s clinic page lists filler injections at $495, last updated March 2025). Cash is cheaper, but not every ATM in town dispenses US dollars. |
| On the bill itself, Marcell’s verdict was short: “I had no additional expenses.” |
| Marcell, United States Verified Patient |
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| Quick Reads |
| Beauty |
| Seoul’s skin clinics are winning over Americans |
| South Korea treated 2.01 million foreign patients in 2025, up 72% in a single year, and about 173,000 of them came from the US, according to government figures compiled by Medical Tourism Watch. Most came for skin rather than surgery: dermatology made up 62.9% of visits. Seoul wants more. The Korea Tourism Organization held its first big US roadshow in Los Angeles on September 17, and on October 1 the fast-track medical visa program grows from 90 to 112 institutions, with three-day e-visa processing and broader rules for caregivers. That matters most if you’re planning a long recovery or bringing someone along. |
| Trend |
| Turkey: fewer patients, same money |
| Turkey’s statistics office counted 1,398,580 health tourists in 2025. That’s down 7.2%, the second yearly drop in a row. Revenue didn’t move: just over $3 billion, flat with 2024. In other words, each patient is spending more, about $2,161 on average versus $1,954 in 2023. Is Turkey getting pricier, or just drawing bigger cases? It’s not clear yet. But if you’re pricing veneers or a hair transplant in Istanbul, get at least two written quotes and line up exactly what each one includes. |
| Destination |
| Malaysia’s big year comes with a footnote |
| Malaysia has named 2026 its Year of Medical Tourism, and the Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council has good numbers to show for it: about 1.84 million healthcare travelers in 2025 and roughly RM 3.34 billion (about $790 million) in revenue, beating the government’s own RM 3 billion target. But the count includes expats and business travelers treated while they happened to be in the country, and revenue works out to about $430 per traveler. Interesting… That’s low for serious surgery, which suggests much of the count is routine care. The goal is RM 12 billion a year by 2030. We’ll see. |
| Safety Note |
| Pack your records, not just your passport |
| Before you pay a deposit anywhere, the CDC suggests checking your provider’s qualifications and lining up follow-up care at home. It also warns that treating complications can get expensive, and the insurance you already have may not cover it. (Standard travel insurance usually excludes planned procedures, too.) Two cheap fixes: get the clinic to put in writing who handles complications and what that costs, and leave with a full copy of your records, X-rays and implant or product details included, so the next doctor knows exactly what was done. |
