Hello from Spinal Surgery Mexico.
I want to begin this blog by providing some background on how we started our medical tourism company. My wife, Pat Marino, started her business in Mexico in 1994 with faceliftmexico.com and is still in business to this day. In 2012, we decided to move to Mexico and buy a deluxe 4-star retreat that we could use for her patients.
I (Gregory Pope), was approached by Dr. Mario Salmon Franz, MD, FACS, FANNS, a neurosurgeon performing spinal surgery and brain surgery. His credentials were impeccable. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. His complete curriculum vitae is on the front page of spinalsurgerymexico.com, his full bio is about 30 pages long, so impressive! He’s been practicing spine surgery since 1993, specializing in stabilization versus fusion, which he learned to perform in Austria and Germany. Not many surgeons in the United States or Canada know how to do this procedure.
He also learned how to do a procedure for the cervical spine with an ADR (artificial disc replacement). All the material that he uses is from Germany, the very best quality of material. The artificial disc for the cervical area is called ROTAIO (SIGNUS), and there is a video on the front page at the bottom of how the procedure is performed.
So after much planning we decided to start spinalsurgerymexico.com to help international patients, mainly from Canada and the United States.
In certain parts of Canada the wait time for spine surgery can take up to three years because it is called an elective surgery, and in the United States, the prices are so very expensive; that people without insurance or underinsured can’t afford to have a surgery, so we thought this was the best way to be able to help people and that was our main goal with an affordable price about 1/3 the cost of the United States and no wait times for Canadians.
It took some time to finalize all the details, and surgery was performed on our first patient, Cheri Junker from Mesa, Arizona. She came to Mexico to have spine surgery with Dr. Mario Salmon.
Please look at her video on the webpage, in Arizona they told Cheri it would cost USD 200,000 to have a surgery and there was no way she could afford to have that so she did some research on the Internet and found spinalsurgerymexico.com and took a chance to come to Mexico, not knowing Dr. Salmon or Gregory Pope.