Medical tourism is booming. But is it a price worth paying? | Eva Wiseman

I was on hold at the doctor’s office when I saw an Instagram video of a pink-haired travel influencer documenting, “One of the best things we’ve ever done,” what turned out to be a “three-day comprehensive medical checkup” in Turkey. It was enchanting, with the uplifting plinky music and girly voice that sounds like he’s sharing fantastic gossip as he describes, in this case, her boyfriend’s cranial MRI, ultrasound, colonoscopy, neurology, and urology appointments during their romantic mini-vacation. And it looked romantic. We see him, his expression on his face, being wheeled between fancy offices. A chest CT! A colon biopsy! More, his eyes begging, I love you, more! The influencer is so invested in this post, she’s organizing group trips, “so we can all go together and get checked out!”

To get an appointment with my GP, I guess it’s the same for you, you have to call at 8am sharp. If you call at 7:59am, you’ve screwed up. If you call at 8:01am, you’re dead. At 8am, I was somehow third in line. I had recently received an appointment letter from the hospital saying I had to come at 9:45am, but that I had to prepare for a wait of up to three hours. The wait, this wait for health and attention, feels like walking through deep mud, with splashes of guilt and anger. And when I saw the glamorous video, with the montage of our influencer biting into a watermelon on the beach, I was seduced, it was me, for a minute, by the dream of medical tourism.

This year the medical tourism industry was valued at $47 billion and is expected to be worth more than $111 billion in five years. This is partly due to the struggle to get treatment in the UK, or the cost of going private. Last year, a woman who went to Lithuania for a knee replacement rather than remain on the NHS waiting list told the Observer: “The reason is that people are in pain. This is not medical tourism; it is medical desperation.” Partly, that’s because countries that offer package holidays are investing heavily in luring tourists, with tax breaks and glossy influencer ads. Elise Huauthor of Flawless: Lessons in looks and culture from the K-Beauty capitalwrote about the introduction of ‘plastic surgery certificates’ by the Korea Tourism Organization. These certificates can be used if a tourist is unrecognizable on his or her passport photo after surgery upon returning home.

And this, I think, is the other reason why medical tourism is flourishing – not just the fear that drives people, like the influencer, to undergo three days of serious tests on a healthy body, but also the pressure to become a younger version of themselves, somewhere in a business park in Turkey. Thousands of people travel there every year from the UK, and to Mexico, South Korea and Thailand, for hair transplants, cosmetic dentistry and nose jobs, operating on parts of their bodies that they are convinced, in the pursuit of profit, consider defective. They travel not because of the physical agony that brought that woman to Lithuania, but because of a more general desperation, a shameful pain.

This is despite the fact that we know the potential risks of surgery and that even a successful surgery is no guarantee of happiness. Data collected by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (Baaps) revealed that the number of people requiring hospital treatment in the UK after cosmetic surgery abroad, including intensive care and emergency surgery, has risen by 94% in three years. At least 28 Britons have been on medical tourism to Turkey and subsequently died, since 2019 (according to the government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), with seven deaths since 2023.

Last month it was reported that Kaydell Brown, 38, from Sheffield, paid £5,400 for a ‘mummy MOT’ – a package deal including a Brazilian buttock augmentation, tummy tuck and breast enlargement – but died during surgery in Istanbul. E-mailOnline added the detail that “parts of her organs are also reportedly missing now.” Horrors abound, not least the simple fact of the “mummy MOT,” a popular kit that attempts to transport a woman back in time, to the person she was before childbearing transformed her body, and ultimately restore the way she felt. That is: devalued, irrelevant, invisible. And wanting this? Striving for a return, whether that means dieting or saving up for surgery, is normal—it just feels like a continuum of the daily chores of childcare and housecleaning, so integrated into a mother’s life that it’s barely worth mentioning.

The appeal of traveling abroad for surgery is not so different, I think, from the appeal of traveling abroad. That promise of transformation, of coming home from a vacation relaxed and wiser and healed and beautiful. But the risks are greater than just missing a flight or losing luggage—there is also the risk, in a hundred terrible ways, of losing yourself.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman