On weekday mornings in late winter, they start to arrive before dawn. They drive in from Arizona or California, catch a shuttle from Yuma, or park their car in a lot in the Sonoran Desert and cross the border on foot. The path for pedestrians follows State Route 186, past a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses offering free Bible courses, along a twisting corridor of razor wire and chain-link fence, through passport control, and into Los Algodones. By noon, more than a thousand people will have walked from the United States to Mexico, in the shadow of the thirty-foot wall that divides them. They come on bicycles and in wheelchairs, pushing walkers and leaning on canes. They come to be healed or transformed or to put an end to their pain, preferably at deep-discount prices.
I read on. Bilger describes Los Algodones, also known as Molar City, as “part Lourdes and part Costco.” More than a thousand dentists have set up shop there. Their patients are mostly Americans who can’t afford the U.S.’s dental care. Bilger visits the place. He writes,
When I first arrived, on a Sunday evening in March, the clinics were all closed. At the Quechan Casino, on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation just across the border, the slot machines were thronged with patients killing time before their appointments or flights home. Myron Arndt, a former tire-shop owner from Minnesota, was hunched over a Rich Little Piggies machine. He was scheduled to get four new front teeth the next day. Mike Sherer, a tinsmith from Michigan, was having some dentures and implants put in, and Terry Bussard, a retired magnesium-plant foreman from Utah, was sporting two new plates of dentures. One of the few without an appointment was Conny Everett, who runs a pretzel stand at local fairgrounds. She needed a cavity filled but couldn’t bring herself to go. She has a tendency to gag during procedures, she told me. “Last year, I got in the chair—it was all paid for—and I just chickened out. I’m, like . . .” She put her fist in her mouth and widened her eyes.
I relish that “hunched over a Rich Little Piggies machine.”
Bilger stays at the Hacienda Los Algodones (“Every morning at the Hacienda Los Algodones, guests gather over breakfast to trade stories about their teeth”). He visits a Los Algodones dental clinic called Sani Dental:
The glass door to Sani Dental was outlined by a giant tooth. Stepping inside from the clattering street felt like a jump cut in an action film, with a subtitle saying “Miami” or “Dubai.” The lobby was hushed and spacious, with two eager young receptionists in matching polo shirts. A long arched corridor stretched behind them, soothingly lit like an undersea passage. There were seventeen examination rooms on one side and a row of white leather couches on the other, with waiting patients. The clinic’s thirty-five dentists and sixty-six support staff see more than nine thousand clients a year. (Sani also has branch offices in Cancún and Playa del Carmen, as well as a plastic-surgery and hair-transplant clinic in Los Algodones called Sani Medical.) At its newly built, three-story laboratory, teams of designers create digital models of implants and dentures, then fabricate the molds with 3-D printers. The finished products are cast in ceramic, gold, titanium, steel, or chromium cobalt, then glazed by local artisans to match the patient’s teeth and gums.
He gets his own teeth examined: “Being a patient at Sani Dental is a bit like being a car chassis at a Ford factory. For the next three days, my teeth and I would get passed from scheduler to diagnostician to clinician to lab tech, then back to the clinician, and finally to an accountant to settle the bill.”
Diagnostician, Dr. Miranda Villa, delivers the assessment:
To stay healthy, he said, my teeth would need ten fillings, mostly to plug the gaps exposed by receding gums. Straightening them out would take a little more work. All but four of my teeth—twenty-eight in total—would need to be reshaped. This meant grinding them down to little nubs of enamel, like pegs on a cribbage board, then capping them with crowns. The Sani lab would cast the crowns out of white zirconia, a ceramic much harder than stainless steel, tint them to my specifications, and shape and size them to fit my jaw. Then a clinician would cement them into place.
And the cost? Bilger writes,
The ten fillings would be seven hundred dollars—about a fourth of the going rate in Brooklyn. The full treatment would cost fourteen thousand. Before I made my decision, though, Sani Dental would mock up some plastic crowns that could fit over my existing teeth. “Smile Design,” Miranda Villa called it. “It’s like trying on a suit before you buy it,” he said.
Bilger opts for the fillings and undergoes the “smile design” procedure (“Terrazas spent the next twenty minutes chiselling off any rough edges and seams. It was an oddly claustrophobic experience: I felt like a statue trapped inside a piece of marble, slowly getting released by a pick and a drill”). Then he makes an interesting journalistic move. Before he decides on whether to go through with the teeth-straightening, he visits a famous Beverly Hills dentist, Dr. Kevin Sands, for a second opinion. The result is the same: “twenty-eight crowns and one implant. The only difference was in cost. Sands wanted a hundred and nineteen thousand dollars for the work—more than eight times the Sani Dental price.”
In the end, Bilger decides not to have his teeth straightened. I love the way he puts it: “Still, there’s something to be said for staying crooked. The more I looked at the Smile Design picture from Sani Dental, the more I knew that I’d miss my old biters.”
In summarizing this great piece, I’ve omitted many wonderful details, e.g., the x-ray of Bilger’s skull (“What stuck with me, instead, was the sight of my skull. It looked like something unearthed by paleontologists in Tanzania: ancient, battered, encrusted with minerals”), the guy who is in Los Algodones not to have his teeth fixed but to get his truck customized (“ ‘I want leather bucket seats and pearlescent paint with metal flakes on the bodywork,’ he said. ‘It’ll have live flames in front that taper into ghost flames’ ”).
“Word of Mouth” immersed me in the Molar City dental experience. I enjoyed it immensely.
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