U.S. medical tourists to Mexico with prostate cancer increasing

Despite Doubts, Cancer Therapy Draws Patients

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico — Some weekends, more than a dozen American men wait at beachfront hotels, anxious for their turns in the treatment room at a small private hospital here.

They are medical tourists with prostate cancer. And they are queued up for the latest therapy — one advertised with pictures of couples strolling on the beach and pitched as a way to treat the patients’ disease while preserving their sex lives.

The treatment is called high-intensity focused ultrasound, or HIFU (pronounced HIGH-foo). And instead of using surgery or radiation, it attacks the cancerous tissue by heating the prostate to temperatures near boiling.

Tropical beaches aside, there is a reason that hundreds of American men have traveled out of the country to receive HIFU. It is not approved in the United States. And its growing popularity has some cancer experts voicing caution. They argue that there is not yet enough evidence that the treatment stops cancer over the long run and they say the side effects are not as minimal as described by US HIFU, the company sponsoring the offshore treatment weekends.

The company is attracting attention for its aggressive recruitment of American doctors who will go through training and perform the treatments. The company charges patients $25,000 to $30,000, a fee that is usually not reimbursed by insurance. Of that, the company pays the doctors $5,000 to $7,500 — several times what physicians earn for conventional prostate cancer procedures in the United States.

NY Times