There was an excellent article in the Huffington Post this morning about
“dental tourism” which is well worth reading. It’s about USAers
going to Mexico to get dental care that they could not afford nor find in the
USA, but also has pertinent words about medical tourism in general.
I have already
written a post about going to Mexico for dentistry, but have found
such a good dentist in Canada – Dr. David Mady in Windsor, Ontario,
only 200 miles away - that I no longer need to go to Mexico.
Getting good dental
care in the US, particularly if you’re poor, is excruciatingly
difficult and expensive. Dental insurance is pitiful and I often see
people here in Dayton, Ohio, who just have all their teeth pulled out
because they can’t afford dentistry.
I have often
wondered how a millionaire could enjoy his yacht and still be aware,
as he must be, of all the children who have tooth pain in his own
community. How can he do it?! Everything is known and remembered and
is permanent, despite attempts to evade or deny.
But what touched me
most about the HuffPo article, despite being on a specific problem
that appalls me, is the last paragraph quoting one of the dental
patients who travels to Mexico from the USA for dentistry:
“Those guys are professionals. They work quick. They work as
a team,” Rodman said. “They’re just as nice as they possibly
could be. They treat you like a person, you know? You’re not just
cattle run through there.”
Doesn’t
that last sentence just ring your bell? “They
treat you like a person, you know? You’re not just cattle run
through there.”
The
solution of every social problem I have encountered seems to me to
require that we deepen our humanness – by which I mean our ability
to see a situation from the Other’s point of view. I taught a
sociology course for many years entitled
“Contemporary Social Problems,” and that was
the hard lesson of it for me.
