You’d be surprised how many reasons people have to go to Yuma, Arizona. They go for the weather, the four thousand yearly hours of baking sunlight. They go for the casinos, rising up by the highway on the lands of the Quechan and the Cocopah. They go to witness the arsenal of the largest standing army in the world at the Yuma Proving Grounds, where mortars and brimstone missiles pummel the Sonoran Desert. And then there are people who go for the same reason I did: because they’re afflicted with aching and rotting teeth, with broken molars and crooked gums, mouths full of pain that follow them around like debts. Because just across the border from Yuma, so close you can walk it, is Los Algodones—Molar City. The dental tourism capital of the world.
Every year roughly 120,000 Canadians and Americans cross the border into Los Algodones. There they spend millions of dollars on dental care that costs a fraction of what it does back home. The town’s population hovers around five thousand, but it’s home to over five hundred practicing dentists who power the local economy and contribute to the booming global medical tourism industry.
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