Virtually unknown until just a few years ago, the terms ‘medical tourism’ and are rapidly becoming familiar to most households in many first-world countries. Describe is the increasingly popular practice of travelling to another country to obtain health care. 

 

Some have said that medical tourism first emerged in ancient Greece, where people travelled from afar to seek treatment by the father of medicine, Herodotus. More recently, in the 20th century wealthy patients from developing countries would travel to first-world countries such as the USA or Germany for treatment. 

However, nowadays the term ‘medical tourism’ is exclusively associated with patients travelling to other countries, such as Turkey, which offer not just low-cost and high-quality treatment but also the opportunity of combining it with a holiday in a popular tourist destination. 

 

Factors that have contributed to the growth of medical tourism include:

•        The development in recent years by less-developed countries of high-quality, cutting-edge health care service industries, with many doctors trained overseas;

•        Medical facilities have been built that match or even surpass in quality some “western” hospitals and health centres;

•        And all this comes at a cost often several times lower than the typical “western” cost of medical treatment;

•        On the demand side, patients from industrialized countries often face long waiting lists and high treatment costs. Aging population there needs increasingly more health care, and increased life expectation has added to the demand for health care;

•        The advance of the Internet has made acquiring information and making contacts with overseas hospitals easy, and competition in the airline industry has brought down the cost of travel.

 

The main point is that the quality of dental treatment in Turkey is not only comparable to, but in some case more advanced than, what is on offer in some industrialized countries. This is due to the fact that most facilities have been built only in recent years, and that governments and private sector have invested heavily in both hardware and health education and training.

 

Yet another point not to be ignored is the cost of treatment. Depending on the procedure, the cost in Turkey for most health treatments can be 4-6 times lower than in West Europe, North America or Australia. These lower costs can be achieved mostly through lower cost of setting a practice, cheaper specialized education and training, lower cost of construction and real estate, and, crucially, our belief that doctors are there to serve patients and not to bankrupt them.

 

Rather than undergo a prolonged treatment in your country for which you pay a small (and sometimes not so small) fortune, why not save some of the cost and still be able to pay not only for the treatment but also for a week or two of a vacation for yourself and your family. Indeed, just coming to have one dental bridge made in Turkey  will give you enough savings to pay for a 2-week vacation of a family of four.