Why Mexico Is a Good Option for Dental Work
Updated November, 2023
Dental Haves and Dental Have-Nots in America
Perdóname, joven, who is your dentist?
Years ago, I was a ski-instructor in Snowshoe, West Virginia. When I mentioned my job, people would often tell me how lucky I was to be that good a skier. I told them I wasn’t. In truth, I was an intermediate skier at best, and that all you needed to be ski instructor at Snowshoe, West Virginia was a full set of teeth (Before you chastise me, understand it’s true. West Virginia has the worst dentistry of any state in the country).
After moving to Colorado in 2009, I would visit a friend who lived in Idaho Springs, a mining town in foothills of the Rockies only about a half-hour from Denver, very much like Snowshoe in many ways. A superb story-teller, when describing her town my friend would say, “Here in Idaho Springs, we have two kinds of people. Them with teeth and them with no teeth.”
But easy kidding aside, it’s no joke. Teeth are important professional and social markers. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have written articles about how the skyrocketing cost of dentistry is making yet another contribution to the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in America society. Costs are reported to have risen about 5% a year for two decades. I contend it’s been appreciably higher in any larger city.
Dentistry in Mexico: Costs and Considerations
I became aware of the escalation in prices when I was advised to use a mouth guard while sleeping (an attractive accompaniment to my sleeping mask and probably a contributing factor to past boyfriends being at least moderate drinkers.) My bill for the upper-jaw-only plastic mold, which I purchased in Evergreen, Colorado was over $600.
A Mexican whom I dated later, a guy with an amazing, brilliant smile (the first thing I noticed about him) paid $80 for his, which of course he bought in Mexico. You see many more adults with braces in Mexico. They take good care of their teeth because they can afford to.
When my lower-back teeth began to radiate pain and tenderness. Thinking it was probably another cavity, I went in to see a dentist in Denver only to find I would need a root canal ($1,500-$2,000 dollars). I thanked the gods-of-all-things-holy that I would be returning to Mexico soon.
A legion of Mexican friends with beautiful smiles stood waiting with their periodontist referrals when I asked them. At first, I went to the one Vicente Fox went to. He advised me that by having more periodic deep cleanings I could avoid a root canal. These he would do himself for $110 dollars. In Mexico, going to periodontists are so inexpensive (my visit cost 500 pesos, or about $25 dollars), I have begun going to them even for replacing fillings.
Later, I did go about having the root canal in Mexico, requiring the replacement of nasty 30 year old crown on top of it. The process took six trips to the dentist in Mazatlán, each trip taking at least an hour. The cost was less than $700, including the initial exam and cleaning. A cleaning usually runs about $20. Dental work in Mexico will likely cost half of what the same procedure would cost in the U.S. Here is the price list of the clinic I went to.
Cleaning 490 pesos ($26 US)
Whitening at home: 2,400 pesos ($129)
Other types of cleaning ranged from 1,900-2,500 pesos ($102 - $135)
Porcelain crown: 2,800 ($150)
Crown reinforcement (post): 1,200 ($65)
Simple extraction: 700 ($38)
Complex extraction: 900 ($49)
Composite veneers; 1,000 ($54)
Endoncia (root canal): 1,290 ($70)
Removable Prosthesis: range from 800 - 4,700 (total prosthesis) pesos ($43 - $250)
When I was a child growing up in rural Oklahoma, my mother would get me out from under her feet by giving me twenty-five cents to go buy penny candy at a store a mile away. I still remember the candy necklaces. Imagine her chagrin when her eight-year old’s first dental appointment revealed cavities in almost every single baby tooth, all of which she dutifully had filled on a social worker’s salary. What would a mouthful of fillings cost today?
Every time I go to Mexico and have dental work at a fraction of the cost, I think of of all those people in West Virginia, Idaho Springs, Colorado, and all those other often rural areas like I did, like the working class people interviewed by the Washington Post and the New York Times, who don’t have the money, can’t live with the pain and have to get teeth pulled rather than repaired.
I was very lucky to have a mother who felt dentistry was a priority, unlike the West Virginian ex-girlfriend of a boyfriend of mine who lost all her teeth before she was thirty. This really happens. And poor dentistry isn’t just an obvious indication of economic hardship. It’s a gateway to various other health problems, such as respiratory infections, diabetes, even dementia.
Frustratingly, the basic technique of medically-necessary dental work hasn’t changed in decades. The advances of the last 25 years have been largely in the level of patient comfort and types of materials used, especially as related to cosmetic dentistry, which has taken off as wealthier Americans spend millions on veneers and whitening.
You can avail yourself of cosmetic dental services in Mexico too. I recently had a home teeth-whitening tray made for about $140 dollars here. They cost between $250 - $400 in the U.S. I had four of my teeth bonded for $110 dollars (the dentist threw one in for free), which would have cost $300 a tooth in Denver.
Why dental costs are so high in the US
Dentists’ frequent unwillingness to pass along x-rays if you get a new dentist or a specialist and their insistence on unnecessary annual x-rays are one of a number ways costs are jacked up.
Expensive technology such as x-ray machines are expected in a dental office. In Mexico, individual offices don’t have their own x-ray machine. You make an separate appointment with an dental x-ray center. I recently had panoramic dental x-rays taken for 240 pesos (about $22 dollars). In Mexico, you own your x-rays. You take them out the door with you, which allows you to easily get more than one consultation.
High student debt that dentists in other countries don’t have are another main factor in American dentistry’s high rates. Such economic pressures lead to over-alarming counsel. At home, I was advised to replace a 35 year-old filling in a back tooth as if it were an upmost emergency. Upon arriving to Mexico and having it checked, the dentist advised me that if the tooth wasn’t bothering me, to leave it alone. In her experience, opening up those tiny little Pandora’s Boxes (really old fillings and caps) almost always led to a great deal of additional periodontal work.
Who’s correct? The truth likely falls somewhere in the middle of how two countries regard treatment/cost and why I keep dentists in both.
Predictably, overall utilization of dental services has been going down in the United States for 10 years (the industry seems genuinely, surprisingly, puzzled about this). Fewer people having routine work done only incentivizes increasing the fees more for remaining patients.
Like so many services in the U.S., you can’t elect a less expensive option. These options don’t make enough profit for the provider, leaving options that are financially out of reach for all but those who can afford the updated, more expensive one (or folks like my mother who probably served Hamburger Helper for months.)
No one plans to go back to silver fillings, but when I had a filling replaced in Mazatlán my first year here, I noted with some alarm one of those porcelain saliva bowls of my youth in the Mexican dentist’s office. The procedure, with a cleaning, cost less than $50. Seven years later, the filling is fine.
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About the author:
Hola, I'm Kerry Baker and am the author of "If Only I Had a Place," a guide to renting luxuriously for less in Mexico, for aspiring expats planning their first long-term stay. My third book is “The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico.” It’s a how-to book certain to entertain. My most recent book, written with food blogger Fabiola Rodriquez Licona is The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico. In Mexico, to maintain a healthy diet you must cook, a challenge in a foreign culture. Don’t leave home without this book.