Medical tourism and advertising: from myth to prejudice

Today we live in a completely different way from what our parents did and even more, our grandparents. We must not deceive ourselves.

Today life is faster, the flow of information, data and people is exponentially greater and with a strong tendency to increase. Today we are able to access information very quickly, accurately and safely, perform procedures within reach of a cell phone, such as making bank transfers, booking plane trips, car trips, ordering food in a comfortable way, in short, a set of activities such as creating a new company in an hour, while about 15 years ago it took weeks and several visits for the same procedure.

In health, the trend is similar without, however, forgetting the proper approximations and security that we always have to have when we talk about people and more importantly, when we talk about people’s health and well-being, which is the most precious asset that anyone wants to have or protect their loved ones.

Medicine, a new era

We have online consultations in Medicine, we have TV-Medicine, meetings between doctors by videoconference, we live in an era of digitalization, computerization, and advances are presented at a dizzying speed, in prevention, diagnosis, treatment, follow-up.

When we started talking about medical tourism in Portugal, in the last two decades, we heard a lot about the typical trip to paradisiacal destinations and with 2-week vacation packs, tourists took advantage and did the medical procedures, a lot in the area of plastic surgery and dentistry.

Success vs Failure

And how everything in life has come to us with reports of success stories and also stories of frank failure, true nightmares with limitations and disfigurements for the patients involved.

Obviously, as in any other professional area, there are more serious professionals, in the procedures and in obtaining the curricula that allow them to execute the procedures in rigor, safety and quality and then there are the curious, the artists, the skilled with strategic shortenings in learning, true shortcuts through Medicine within and capable of repeating some medical clichés, but which is not enough to be able to exercise in a noble way, something as serious and rigorous as Medicine.

How do we look at Medical Tourism?

We, the medical profession, also started by turning up our noses at these new fashions that came from abroad. Where have you ever seen someone treated in a short period of time, in a few consultations and people with addresses far from our clinics?

The same was said in relation to advertising in Medicine, in our specific case in Dentistry. I remember always hearing my older colleagues and Faculty Professors commenting:

• If I start advertising, it seems that I am distressed without patients and what will colleagues and even patients say?

And what do we have to say about advertising in dentistry?

Regarding advertising, we dentists and also so that the general public that follows us and motivates us to want to be better every day of our profession has an approximate idea, we are under legislation, the code of ethics of the Order of Dentists that accompanies us, legislates, and gives us the rules so that we can advertise our services, but always in a way that never hurts our colleagues, so that we can always live together in a cordial way, united by the spirit of science, by the search for innovative treatments, better materials, and in a spirit of mutual help between peers.

We Cero Team have already asked for help, we have helped, we have worked together with other teams and colleagues, which is normal in a profession as specific and demanding as ours.

Why do we advertise our treatments?

When we advertise our services, our facilities, our own curricula, we even show the faces of our entire Team, it is so that our patients, our future customers can get to know us, can get to know our services, our facilities, so that those who visit us for the first time already feel a little like part of this great Family that is CERO.

And in the consultations we show several cases of other patients that we have already done, so that each patient can identify with the different treatment possibilities and so that they can also see and prove that we know how to do what we set out to do. We don’t just build castles in the clouds…

Another reason for us to advertise what we do is because we like those who follow us, for example on social networks, to understand long before they decide to visit us, whether or not that type of treatment may meet their own expectations.

We must not forget that we live in a society that is increasingly informed and more prepared to discuss solutions, to be an integrated part of the decision-making process. In our Team, clinicians and patients are part of the same solution. We are collaborators at the same level of decision-making.

That paternalistic view of the old doctor who treated the patient almost impersonally, or by “son or daughter” and even addressed the elderly by “you”, using a depersonalization of the patient is already completely arranged in the dusty drawers of other times.

We also have a duty to show our facilities with our virtual Google visits so that the patient can see the type of environment where they will be treated, even before going to the Clinics, thus reducing stress and anxiety rates, reaching a more familiar environment.

In search of the tranquility that excellence harbors

We are very calm with our work, we do what we like, we do what we have been prepared and trained for, so that your treatment is within huge safety margins and predictability, we are perfectly qualified to do what we set out to do.

Our preparation and accumulated experience

Please be absolutely sure of one thing: we don’t do anything that we are not highly trained and prepared to do. We are within a category of professionals who do what they propose and promise. Not only do we say and advertise that we do it, but we actually do it and it is for this reason, one more, that we show what we do in our videos.

The other reason is because our followers and patients simply asked us to show it. And in truth, on the part of those who do not want to see, which we respect in the same way, because they cannot or because they simply do not want to, they reserve the legitimate right not to see, just by not opening the films or images with more explicit content of treatments and surgeries.

Always the old prejudice

When we talk about Medical Tourism, one of the first things that comes to mind is prejudice. The prejudice about the unknown; the prejudice about going to another place, the prejudice about the patient being consulted by a highly specialized team; prejudice about novelty; prejudice just because. In the beginning, when a few years ago this topic began to be debated in Portugal, we all also had this prejudice.

Natural selection

As in everything in life, those who do not evolve, disappear. It reminds us a little when in 2010 the Order of Dentists made it mandatory to legalize all Dental Medicine Clinics and establishments, I met several situations of colleagues older than me and others not so old who simply preferred to close the clinic and go to work for other colleagues’ clinics than to modernize the facilities, adapt them to our days.

Everything evolves, as well as the very concept of patient/client, with the proper charter of their rights and duties always safeguarded for both parties. Gone are the times when there was very little supply in the national market for Dental Medicine treatments. There were situations in which it was not even a dentist or a stomatologist who performed dental treatments.

From usurpers of titles and functions, to curious people, to criminals, everyone had a place in the racket of illegalities that was the practice of Dentistry in the times of the “other Lady”. And in those times, as there was very little supply, each clinic had many patients, and if there was dissatisfaction or lack of quality control, the end was always the same: if this patient does not return, there are thirty more at the door waiting for an appointment.

And in the midst of so much atrocity, so much illegality, so much treatment done with “three blows” (which is still reflected in the older patients who come to our Clinics today) the less we talked about, the less publicity there was, the less we showed what we were doing, the better.

NOTE WELL!

I am not trying to say, not even ironically or in a disingenuous way, that in the past people did not know how to work and that there were no great doctors and professionals, quite the contrary. There were also a large number of usurpers of titles and functions, because there was not the strict control that our Order of Dentists exercises today.

Who has never heard the story of the clinic where the owner died or retired and the assistant was left to give consultations? Or the story of the dentist with the 4th class who came from the army and pulled out some teeth? Or the laboratory technician, the famous “tooth mechanic” who also fixes his mouth, without the law allowing it?

Historical Facts in Dentistry in Portugal

It is important not to forget, or just refocus the theme, that the first Degree in Dentistry in Portugal dates from the early 80s and that our Order of Dentists, formerly linked to the Order of Doctors, dates from 1998.

Therefore, it is all still very recent, very young, from a historical point of view and in this way we can say that the Order itself has been growing and learning from the dentists themselves, and we from the Order, in the interpretation of these new times and this whole new era of digitalization and social networks.

And with this, our generation of Portuguese Dentists in activity is the most differentiated, the most specialized we have ever had. Proof of this is the number of Portuguese professionals who are very well accepted in other countries who request our professionals, where there is excess, to other countries where there is a shortage.