Teeth, boobs or bum — Turkey’s surgeons are here to sell you a solution

“We mainly do crowns and implants,” she said, pointing to a glossy brochure of people with sparklingly white teeth. At just £200 per tooth for a dental crown, she charges less than a third of most private British companies offering the same treatment, and £120 less than the NHS.

Six years ago, Turkey began to emerge as a destination for medical treatment. Data from the Turkish government recorded more than 700,000 global healthcare tourists visiting the country in 2019. Although visitors dipped during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number bounced back in the years that followed, fuelled in part by viral social media videos. In 2023, 1.8 million people travelled to Turkey for surgery.

During a panel discussion at the expo, Gilliam Elliott, the founder of Medical Tourism Business, which facilitates healthcare travel, said: “Patients who can’t get treatment in the UK have to go to private health care which is going to be very expensive.

“When they look beyond their borders and travel abroad for medical care, a lot of the time they are documenting their trip and sharing it with their social media following. This is doing more for the industry than anything else.”

And the industry is bringing in big money. Behlul Unver, the general manager of USHAS, a branch of the Turkish government mandated with regulating medical tourism, said at a conference last month that his country “earned $3.1 billion from health tourism” last year. “[Turkey’s] target for 2028 is $20 billion,” he added.

The benefits of health tourism to Turkey’s economy is self-evident and the country’s government is keen to promote this growing market. Flanked by senior civil servants from Turkey’s health and trade ministries, Osman Koray Ertas, the Turkish ambassador to the UK, said: “Medical tourism is one of the strengths of our country. Turkey is becoming a powerful actor in that regard and we are receiving patients from all around the world including the UK.”

The Office for National Statistics estimated around 430,000 British nationals travelled abroad to locations including Turkey, Dubai and Spain for medical treatment in 2023, up 80,000 on the previous year. Part of the reason is a difficulty in accessing treatment at home, as official data published this week showed 7.46 million patients were on NHS waiting lists.

Last year, the British Dental Association said 97 per cent of new patients were unable to access NHS care. Linda Colla, 75, told the BBC last year she was forced to extract three of her own teeth after being unable to find an NHS dentist in Ottery St Mary, east Devon, where she lived.

Another reason is price. Alpaslan Tapul is an executive at Setur, a tourism company that offers a “door to door” service for Britons wanting treatment in Turkey. “If someone is looking for a hair transplant in Manchester, we send a car and a nurse and take them to Istanbul. We have an air ambulance. We have business jets and we have a helicopter. It’s like Uber: you call us, we send our person.”

And the price for such a comprehensive service? “Hair transplant would be £2,000, not including the plane ticket.” Services like this one, where patients can stay in Turkey for a holiday after going under the knife, have become so popular that it is common to see men with bandaged heads in hotel lobbies and on planes. The procedure itself lasts just a few hours and patients rarely need to stay in hospital overnight.

Dr Ali Dogukan Angin described himself as a specialist in “genital aesthetics,” offering patients a range of services including labiaplasty — reducing the size of the labia minora — and vaginoplasty — tightening the vaginal canal. His laptop scrolled through a slideshow of women’s genitals as he explained how his clinic offers patients a two-day hotel stay and airport transfers, included in the cost of surgery.

At Angin’s practice, packages typically start from £3,500. In the UK, a labiaplasty can start at £4,000 and increase to as much as £12,000 for the surgery alone.

The surgeon said 70 per cent of his customers were British, and that the low price was partly down to economic differences. “Everything is cheaper in Turkey. The minimum wage in Turkey is around £700 a month. The exchange rate is also very good.”

Angin added that Turkish doctors could also perform surgeries that are illegal in the UK but unrestricted abroad. “Hymenoplasty is restoring the hymen, which shows you are a virgin. Maybe this is not a good operation but some patients demand it. Once I had an English patient who came for this surgery. She told me that she was getting married to a Muslim man who wanted that.”

In 2022 the UK made it illegal to carry out a hymenoplasty, as well as making it illegal for UK nationals and residents to perform or aid and abet the surgeries outside the UK, though the controversial practice has continued. Government guidance says the operation constitutes coercive control and so-called “honour-based” abuse.

The frank admission that such a controversial procedure is available underscores a darker side to the health tourism industry, in which cowboy surgeons with poor standards of care have begun capitalising on growing demand for operations. According to the UK foreign office, at least 28 Britons have died following medical procedures in Turkey since 2019.

The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons has said the number of people needing hospital treatment in the UK after getting cosmetic surgery abroad increased by 94 per cent in three years. It calculated the cost to the NHS as £15,000 for every patient seeking corrective surgery.

In March last year, Kaydell Brown, 38, a hairdresser from Sheffield, died after undergoing a “Mummy MOT” surgery at a clinic in Istanbul, which included a tummy tuck, liposuction and a Brazilian bum lift. When Brown’s body was examined in the UK, a coroner found large parts of her brain, lungs and heart were missing.

Ambassador Ertas said his country’s government took these cases seriously, promising “due process both administratively and judicially”.

For Angin, the genital surgeon, the deaths are not concerning. “These incidents are very, very rare. In every country people die. Of course there are bad hospitals in Turkey, but there are bad hospitals in the UK too.”

Kyrhys Devoe, 28, is a make-up artist and content creator, was initially concerned about reports of botched surgery but eventually felt sufficiently comfortable to travel to Antalya in southwest Turkey to receive a full set of teeth veneers for £6,000.

“For me, it took me about five years to get my teeth done because I heard all these different stories and I wasn’t very trusting of Turkey at first. But as soon as I started doing my research and talking to a few patients, I was like, ‘OK cool’, and I’ve not had any issues at all.”

But when things do go wrong, the consequences can be devastating. Kaydell Brown’s sister, Leanne Brown, last year told ITV about the callous way the family was treated. “They just gave me an envelope and said here’s your money back and here’s your sister’s money back. It’s like: ‘Sorry she’s dead. Here’s your plane ticket.’”

She added: “I just miss talking to her. She was loud, she was funny. Anyone who meets her will just say she smiled and she laughed.”