Things to love about Mexico: Affordable medical care

I'll get to the crazy photo in a minute, which is the downside of the medical scene here. We're suffering through our first round of sinus and not so first round of ear infections for the littlest of us, which is not surprising, given that it's cold and flu season here. Of course, the germs are aided by Guadalajara's abysmal ranking in terms of air pollution these days, and locals would also blame the cold and dry climate. I'll concede it's dry this time of year, but as for the cold, I'm still waiting for it, even as the thermometer dips to a bracing low 80s during the day. Anyway, I've spent a fair amount of time in various doctors' offices lately and it's been a pleasure to experience a very different kind of medical economy after years of living in a town that suffered from a severe shortage of medical practitioners, on top of all the usual problems of American health care, like inflated costs and gatekeeper insurers, etc., etc. We very much appreciated our doctors, but they were overburdened and facing tremendous pressures from the client load, the malpractice insurance, and again, all the usual woes of the American health system. So wow, what a breath of fresh air to spend a leisurely half an hour or more with the pediatrician for the whopping sum of about $40 (and he's on the pricey end of things), or to waltz into the office of an ENT specialist after calling for an appointment that very morning. The latter visit, which included some very interesting procedures on my nose that I shall not detail here, set me back a whopping $45, and would have easily run upwards of $200 after waiting weeks for an appointment in the U.S. These docs are all U.S. trained, keep up on the latest research and practices through their connections in the U.S., speak lovely English, which is very nice when you are sick or dealing with screaming sick children, and are apparently able to actually take the time to speak with their patients.

So what's the downside? Well, it's no small irony, given that so many Americans seek to buy cheaper prescription medications here, that the real problem is with those very same prescription drugs. There is a huge contraband market here in pharmaceuticals, some of which are poorly manufactured, some of which is expired, and some of which should not be sold without a prescription but is nonetheless available if you know where to look. Mike was invited to witness the public burning of a huge cache of confiscated pharmaceuticals, seen in the photo above. Here's to hoping that our current round of antibiotics are the real thing (and more later on the porqueria surrounding the recent implementation of a law requiring a prescription for antibiotics).