How Canadian Dental Tourism Exploits Mexican Workers

The town of Los Algodones in Mexico is nicknamed “Molar City”. It has a population of just 6,000 people and, shockingly, it has more than 500 practising dentists. This has produced an intense clustering of dental clinics within a four block radius.

Many of these dentists chose to work in this town because of the tourist traffic, given its proximity to the Mexico-United States border. Thousands of Canadian and American tourists park their cars and walk across the border into Los Algodones to spend the day souvenir shopping, eating and drinking in the local restaurants, and purchasing alcohol, prescription drugs and dental care at lower costs than available back home.

In 2015 and 2016, I spent four months living in Los Algodones conducting interviews and participating in local events for a doctoral research project in health sciences at Simon Fraser University. My work investigates dental travel as part of the wider phenomenon of “medical tourism” — an industry that is growing rapidly as more and more patients seek access to new or more affordable medical treatments outside of their countries of residence.

My research raises concerns about exploitative industry practices in Los Algodones, Mexico. These include poor working conditions and discriminatory practices for employees in dental clinics, harassment of Indigenous street vendors and lack of access to dental care for local residents.

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This piece first appeared at The Conversation.

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