From the FT’s special section on investing in Colombia (“Medellín thrives on medical tourism”):
Luis Ruiz has an expansive view of Medellín’s Santo Domingo neighbourhood from his hospital bed.
Once the nerve centre of Pablo Escobar’s cocaine empire, a training ground for his assassins and the scene of pitched battles with leftwing guerrillas, Santo Domingo supplied more than its fair share of victims to Medellín’s hospitals and morgues in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Today, the steep jumble of corrugated iron rooftops is held up around the world as a model of urban regeneration and Medellín’s hospitals are taking advantage of the expertise cultivated in those dark years to develop a new business model: medical tourism.
“It’s very sad, but it’s true. The doctors in Medellín got a lot of corpses to practise on,” says Diego Andrés Martínez, of ACI, the city’s investment promotion agency. “They became experts in transplants. The French were practising on rabbits to develop a trachea transplant. And then some guy from Colombia did it in Medellín.”
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