Americans are looking to find sus sonrisas bonitas en Mexico

Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to enjoy excellent dental care.

My childhood dentist was Dr. Leo Wigdor, who having acquired the practice of Dr. Simpson, my father's childhood dentist, moved to Worcester after the war. Dr. Wigdor was a terrific dentist and real character. As I recall, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he had grown up in Missouri - on a mule farm? can that be right? During the war, he was stationed at Fort Monmouth, NJ where at some point he made the acquaintance of Julius Rosenberg. A patient, maybe? In any case, according to Dr. Wigdor, "Julius Rosenberg was as guilty as sin."

After I moved to Boston, I still went back to Worcester for a few years, then switched to a dentist in Boston on the recommendation of some folks I worked with. He was fine, but retired soon after I began seeing him. On the recommendation of some other folk I worked with - the man I eventually married - I started seeing Dr. Edwin Riley III, a most excellent dentist. His son Dr. Edwin IV is my current dentist. Another excellent dentist, and chip off the old block.

Whenever I've seen a dentist or endodontist (I've had a few root canals along the way), they have told me that it's obvious that I had very good dental care as a kid. (It helped that I inherited my mother's high quality teeth.) I may still have a filling or two that's been in my mouth for over 60 years. This reaction is different than that experienced by my husband. He had grown up poor in a small town in Vermont. When he got to college, he fell and broke a tooth. When the dentist looked in Jim's mouth, his first words were "country boy, eh?"

So lucky me. Good teeth. Good dentists. And able to afford good dentists, even when I didn't have dental insurance. Which has been most of the time.

Other than routine care, I've had a couple of root canals and a couple of crowns. And, thanks to my using my teeth as implements for tasks other than chomping over the years - e.g., using my teeth to open a tiny hotel bottle of shampoo - I do have a couple of veneers on front teeth that became way, way, way too chipped. 

As I said, lucky me.

Dental care, of course, can be expensive. Oh, sure, there's dental insurance. But most people don't have it, and it tends to cover preventive and routine care, rather than bigger deal procedures like root canals, which under most policies is partially covered, if at all.

So some people are finding their way to Mexico, to the town of Los Algodones, just across the Arizona border which has pretty much become La Cuidad Dentistas. Or, as it's come to be more popularly known, Molar City, the place where dental tourists can come to save a lot of money. 

In 1969, Dr. Bernardo Magaña, newly graduated from dental college at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, set up shop directly across the street from border control. Within a year, he was treating dozens of patients a day, most of them Americans. It would be more than a decade before many other dentists joined him. The town was just too rough, Magaña’s son, Bernardo, who now runs the practice with his brother and his mother, told me. “So my dad took it upon himself to clean it up.” In the early eighties, Magaña was elected mayor of Los Algodones. Backed by the state government in nearby Mexicali, he cracked down on vice and shuttered the most notorious establishments in town. Year by year, the bars gave way to dental clinics, the partygoers to patients. According to Roberto Díaz and Paula Hahn, who run a website about medical tourism called Border CRxing, Los Algodones now has the highest per-capita concentration of dentists in the world: well over a thousand in a population of fifty-five hundred. (Source: The New Yorker)

That is an awful lot of dentists. Massachusetts has about 5,600 dentists for a population of a bit over 7 million. Or, one dentist for every 1,250 people. Far better than the national average, which is about one dentist for roughly 1,800 folks. Which is a very far cry from one dentist for five-and-a-half mouths.

But mostly the Algodones dentists are caring for Americans, not locals.

“My family dentist when I was a kid, there was something wrong with the guy,” James Murphy, a retired bookstore clerk from Rhode Island, told me, between spins on a Dragon Link slot machine. “He drilled every tooth in my head. That’s what made my teeth rotten. But he was Irish, and you got to go with the Irish guy.” Murphy was due to fly home the following day with a full set of implants in his upper jaw, and he’d be back in three months to do the bottom teeth. The total cost would be seventeen thousand dollars. “I’ve never smiled so much,” he said. “Back home, it would have been thirty-nine thousand just for the top. And they wonder why people are coming here."

Oh, Jimbo. Your family should have scooted up Route 146 to see Dr. Leo B. Wigdor (who, I will note, replaced the Irish-American dentist of my father's childhood).

People flock to Molar City from all over. Many are snowbirds who flee the winters in the North to spend the winter in Arizona. Others, like James Murphy, find it's worthwhile to travel because dental care there is so cheap. 

There are other medical reasons to cross the border:

Cut-rate pharmacies, opticians, dermatologists, massage therapists, hair-transplant specialists, and exotic medical practitioners line the streets around the dental clinics, promising deals unheard of back in the U.S.

What, pray tell - or is it prey tell - is an exotic medical practitioner? Need to know basis, I guess, and I don't need to know.  

Anyway, there are plenty of reasons to want to have a good set of choppers. You look better. You feel better. And, let's face it, your job and social prospects are a lot better if you have all your teeth and they're some shade of white. 

But there can be at least a little something to say for not having teeth that are too perfect.

When I was a kid, the only kids I knew who wore braces had something seriously wrong with their teeth. I had crooked, crowded lower teeth, as did my sister Kath. But my brother Tom had some kind of weird tooth that grew like a rhino horn out of his upper gum. He got braces. As did my friend Susan, who had a very large gap between her front teeth. Only ritzy people had orthodontia for reasons like crooked teeth. 

My friend Peter grew up in a working class family in Philadelphia. Thanks to his brains and the Jesuits' largesse, Peter got out of Philly and got a great education. But he still had crooked teeth, and as an adult, decided to get braces. One of his friends cautioned against it, warning him that if he straightened his teeth he "risked losing his working class charm."

Peter could afford Boston orthodontia. His teeth look great. He's still charming. 

But for plenty of people, the road to dental happiness runs across the US-Mexican border to Los Algodones.

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Image Source: Dreamstime

And for those who don't speak DuoLingo Spanish, sonrisas bonitas are pretty smiles.