I was on hold to the doctor when I watched an Instagram video where a travel influencer with pink hair documented, “One of the greatest things we’ve ever done”, which turned out to be a “three-day comprehensive medical checkup” in Turkey. It was mesmerising, with the uplifting plinky music and girlish voice that sounds as if it’s sharing fabulous gossip when, in this case, it was detailing the cranial MRI, ultrasound, colonoscopy, neurology and urology appointments her boyfriend underwent on their romantic minibreak. And it did look romantic. We watch him being wheeled between luxury offices with an expression of wonder. A thorax CT scan! A colon biopsy! More, his eyes implore, I love you, more! The influencer has had so much interest in this post, she’s organising group trips, “so we can all go and get checked out together!”
To get a doctor’s appointment at my GP, I guess it’s the same for you, you have to phone at 8am precisely. If you phone at 7.59am, you’ve screwed it. If you phone at 8.01am, you’re dead. At 8am, somehow, I was already third in the queue. I’d recently had a hospital appointment letter that asked me to arrive at 9.45am, but to prepare for a wait of up to three hours. The waiting, this waiting for health and attention, feels like walking through deep mud, with splashes of guilt and fury. And watching the glamorous video, with its montage of our influencer biting into watermelon on the beach, I was seduced, I was, for a minute, by the medical-tourism dream.
This year, the medical-tourism industry was valued at $47bn and is forecast to be worth more than $111bn in five years’ time. Partly this is because of the struggle to get treatment in the UK, or the cost of going private. Last year a woman who’d gone to Lithuania for a knee replacement rather than lingering on the NHS waiting list told the Observer: “The driver here is that people are in pain. This is not medical tourism; it’s medical desperation.” Partly it’s because of that, partly it’s because the countries offering package deals are investing seriously in luring tourists, with tax breaks and glossy influencer ads. Elise Hu, author of Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, wrote about the Korea Tourism Organisation’s introduction of “plastic surgery certificates”, for use if surgery renders a tourist’s face unrecognisable from their passport photo when returning home.
And this, I guess, is the other reason medical tourism is booming – not just the anxiety that leads people, like the influencer, to have three days of serious tests on a healthy body, but the pressure to recapture a younger self, somewhere in a business park in Turkey. Thousands of people are travelling there every year from the UK, and to Mexico, South Korea and Thailand, for hair transplants, cosmetic dentistry and rhinoplasty, operating on pieces of their bodies they have been persuaded, in pursuit of profits, to think of as flawed. They travel not because of the physical agony that took that woman to Lithuania, but with a more generalised desperation, a shameful pain.
This despite knowing the potential risks of surgery, and the fact that even a successful operation will not guarantee happiness. Data compiled by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (Baaps) revealed the number of people needing hospital treatment in the UK after getting cosmetic surgery abroad, including intensive care and emergency operations, increased by 94% in three years. At least 28 Brits have been on medical tourism trips to Turkey and then subsequently died, since 2019 (according to the Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), with seven of those deaths occurring since 2023.
Last month, it was reported that Kaydell Brown, 38, from Sheffield, paid £5,400 for a “mummy MOT” – a package deal involving a Brazilian butt lift, tummy tuck and boob job – but died in surgery in Istanbul. MailOnline added the detail that, “portions of her organs are now also allegedly missing”. Horrors fall on horrors, not least the simple fact of the “mummy MOT”, a popular package that attempts to transport a woman back in time, to the person she was before the act of bearing children transformed her body and, ultimately, to fix the way they feel. Which is: devalued, irrelevant, invisible. And to want this? To strive for a return, whether that means dieting or saving for surgery, is normal – it simply feels like a continuum of the everyday work like childcare and cleaning so integrated into the life of a mother it’s hardly worth mentioning.
The appeal of travelling abroad for surgery is not so different from the appeal, I think, of travelling abroad. That promise of transformation, of returning home from a holiday relaxed and wiser and cured and beautiful. But the risks are greater than just missing a flight, or losing luggage – there’s also the risk, in a hundred horrible ways, of losing yourself.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
