a country · MexicoMexico

The country most US residents cross into for care, and the only destination on this site reachable on foot. The CDC's own chapter names it first in the list of places US patients most commonly travel to for care, ahead of Canada, the Caribbean and several countries in South America. The trade divides into three: dental streets in the border towns, weight-loss surgery in Tijuana and Monterrey, and cosmetic and orthopaedic work in the interior cities. The same chapter names Mexico in three of its documented outbreaks.

Border dentistry is the oldest of it. Los Algodones, in Baja California across the line from Yuma, reported 5,474 people at the 2010 Mexican census; the health researcher Krystyna Adams, who spent four months there in 2015–16, counted "more than 500 practising dentists" in "an intense clustering of dental clinics within a four block radius". The town is called Molar City in the English-language press. Adams's own conclusion was not about price: her fieldwork was published under the heading that the industry exploits the workers who staff it.

Weight-loss surgery is the newer trade, and the one with a measured tail. Surgeons at the University of California San Diego, thirty miles from the border, reviewed 91 patients who had bariatric surgery in Mexico and then presented to them with complications between 2014 and 2024: a sleeve gastrectomy in 69.2% of them, a leak at the staple line or the join in 33.0%, admission in 56.0%, intensive care in 19.8%, and three deaths, 3.3%. Mean total hospital charges came to $193,445.08 per patient, and to $424,975.89 where the complication was a leak. The paper counts the patients who reached one American hospital, not the patients who travelled — a denominator nobody has.

In 2023 two clinics in Matamoros, Tamaulipas — River Side Surgical Center and Clinica K-3 — were closed on 13 May after US patients who had received epidural anaesthesia there developed fungal meningitis. The Mexican Ministry of Health gave the CDC a list of US residents treated at the two clinics between 1 January and 13 May 2023. By 31 August 2023 the CDC's tally was 10 confirmed cases, 14 probable, 9 suspected, 151 persons under investigation, and 12 deaths. The organism found in the spinal fluid was of the Fusarium solani species complex.

Inference — those three stories describe the same country and nothing about them resolves. A dental crown fitted by a licensed dentist in Los Algodones and an epidural given in Matamoros sit in the same jurisdiction, and the tell that separated them was not available to the patient in advance.

Trade practice — the border trade runs on the day trip: park on the US side, walk the pedestrian crossing, see the dentist, walk back. Prices are quoted per item on clinic boards and handbills rather than as packages. The bariatric trade runs on the airport pickup instead — a facilitator meets the patient at San Diego, drives to a Tijuana hospital, and returns them to the border after two or three nights, with follow-up by telephone. Payment is usually cash or card at the clinic, and neither trade bills a US insurer. The interior hospitals in Monterrey, Guadalajara and Mexico City work the way large private hospitals work anywhere: an international office, a quote, a deposit.

The ISAPS survey of plastic surgeons put 1,294,946 aesthetic procedures in Mexico in 2024, 734,082 of them surgical — an extrapolation from the surgeons who answered, not a count of operations. The same survey asked those surgeons what share of their patients came from elsewhere: the median answer in Mexico was 12.0% and the average 23.4%, with the United States, Canada and Colombia the three origins named most often. No figure on this page counts dental patients, who are most of the traffic and almost none of the data.