The Pull of the Earth
How a pandemic, a broken crown, and a city’s quiet gravity brought Dr. Bonnie Rae’s sleep medicine to San Miguel de Allende
There is a story Dr Bonnie Rae tells about the moment she decided to become a dentist. She was a jewelry designer and goldsmith at the time — working with her hands, training her eye for precision and beauty. Then her mother broke the porcelain off a front tooth crown and was mortified. Bonnie sat her down on the toilet seat, gathered her epoxy and tools, and went to work.
When her mother’s dentist examined it the following week, he told her to leave it alone. The repair was that good.
“I said, I think I want to be a dentist,” Dr Bonnie recalls, with the matter-of-fact certainty of someone who has always known, on some level, exactly what she’s doing.
That story says everything you need to know about her: the eye for detail, the instinct to solve, the quiet pride in a job done exceptionally well. What it doesn’t tell you is how far that impulse would carry her — from San Diego to Florida, across a closed border during a global pandemic, and eventually, inevitably, back to a cobblestone city in the highlands of Mexico that seemed to want her there.
“Within hours I felt a physical tug on my being as if the earth was saying to me, ‘You belong here.’”
A Decision Made South Of The Border
It was March 2020. Dr Bonnie had two clinics — one in San Diego, one in Bonita Springs, Florida — and the pandemic had just shut down the world. The San Diego office went dark. The Florida clinic stayed open but the economics were brutal. She needed to reduce overhead, fast.
Her ex-in-laws had long been devotees of San Miguel de Allende — an artist and a retired pediatrician who spent months at a time there. “I knew their living style and requirements,” she says. “I knew they would only live somewhere desirable.” That was enough. She researched exhaustively online, packed up, and arrived sight unseen.
What she found was a city in a rare, hushed state. The pandemic had stilled San Miguel. The streets were quiet, the pace deliberate, the air clear. She and her then-partner spent their days outside, living simply, stretching their savings. It was supposed to be temporary.
Then the border closed. The Florida clinic folded. Three years passed.
When circumstances eventually pulled her back to the US — first to earn, then to care for her mother through her final months — Dr Bonnie thought she’d left Mexico behind. But San Miguel had other ideas. Her first visit back, just to see friends, just to breathe it in again, undid her completely.
“Within hours I felt a physical tug on my being as if the earth was saying to me, ‘You belong here.’” Weeks later, she was moving back. That was 2024.
More Than A Tooth Doctor
Ask Dr Bonnie what she does and she’ll tell you it’s not dentistry in any conventional sense. Her practice sits at a specific, underserved intersection of sleep medicine and facial aesthetics: the anatomy of the head and neck, the mechanics of sleep, the structure of the face, and the outcomes that emerge when all of it functions as it should.
Her primary focus is obstructive sleep apnea — a condition she calls “highly under-diagnosed” and a root driver behind a surprising range of co-morbidities. The jaw, the bite, the airway: these structures govern how we breathe at night, and how we breathe at night governs nearly everything else.
What makes her approach distinctive is that dentistry, uniquely, can offer corrective treatment — not just management. While medicine reaches for CPAP machines or implantable devices, Bonnie designs customized oral appliances that address the anatomical cause of the problem. Her protocols are built on measurement, precision, and a level of one-on-one attention that has become rare in modern sleep medicine.
“There is no guesswork in what I offer.”
She is equally trained in facial rejuvenation: aesthetic injectables, facial harmonization, with hundreds of hours of hands-on work and a Fellowship from the A4M Institute in Dubai. She has trained physicians and dentists in both the US and Mexico. The outcomes she sees most often? Patients contacting her within days to say they haven’t slept this well in years, or barely recognizing themselves in the mirror — in the best possible way.
“Becoming a specialist in the head and neck — to get people out of pain, improve their sleep, and as a side benefit rejuvenate their appearance — is so much more than being a tooth doctor,” she says. “It has allowed me to develop protocols to take care of the whole individual.”
The Patient Knows
At the core of Dr Bonnie’s philosophy is a conviction she has carried across decades of practice: every patient has an innate understanding of their own body. They know when something is wrong, even before they have the language for it. Her job is to give them that language — and then a path forward.
“When they hear my explanations of what is causing their problem and what the solutions are, they get excited to feel understood and heard,” she says. “And very hopeful.”
She does not treat illness as a deficit to be managed. She treats it as a signal to be understood, a structure to be corrected, a body finding its way back to its own intelligence. Her personal wellness practice reflects this deeply: daily meditation and yogic practices initiated by Sadhguru and Guru Pashupati, careful nutrition, sunbathing, nasal breathing, high-quality supplementation. She walks everywhere in San Miguel — no car, an average of four miles a day.
“I haven’t had health insurance in years,” she says. “For me, I will seek alternative methods of care should I fall ill. I am a huge believer in prevention and allowing the body to use its own resources for healing. We all have that power within us — with support to learn how to tap into it.”
“Mexico taught me that it is possible to create a life free of the hustle and bustle I was used to in the US.”
What Mexico Gave Her
Dr Bonnie came from a conventional medical world where alternative modalities were fringe, if acknowledged at all. What she finds in Mexico is entirely different: a genuine plurality of healing traditions existing alongside one another, without hierarchy, without apology.
She’s honest that she’s still learning. The depth of indigenous and traditional Mexican healing practices is vast, and she approaches it with curiosity rather than claim. She notes, with characteristic precision, one point of real professional convergence: the contrast between soft western infant diets and the harder, natural foods of indigenous cultures — and what that difference means for skeletal development, facial structure, and ultimately, the airway.
But beyond the clinical resonance, Mexico gave her something harder to quantify. Her roots are Colombian and Russian. She has lived at different points in the Sultanate of Oman. Across these cultures she recognizes something the US tends to miss: the art of living slowly, of celebrating, of being present in the day without striving through it.
“Mexico taught me that it is possible to create a life free of the hustle and bustle I was used to,” she says. “Many cultures know how to enjoy life with a more relaxed way of being on a daily basis than we do in the US.”
She has found love here. She has found pickleball on early Wednesday mornings, new friends, a Mexican family she didn’t expect. She walks her neighborhood, buys from the tiendas, stays away from what she warmly calls “the gringo side of town.” She is, by any measure, at home.
What She’s Building Next
Dr Bonnie is about to launch something she believes doesn’t yet exist in this form in Mexico: an FDA-approved home sleep ring study program — a foundational piece of sleep medicine most patients never get access to without a hospital stay or a referral that may never come.”
“We cannot fix what we do not measure,” she says simply. “I haven’t found any medical colleagues to work with for sleep studies. This is a foundational step.”
She is excited in the way practitioners get excited when they know they’re filling a genuine gap — not creating a market, but answering a need that was already there, quietly going unmet. Her aim is to identify the problem and offer corrective treatment: the kind only dentistry can provide.
She is also deepening her aesthetic medicine credentials, currently enrolled in a Mini Diplomado Internacional de Armonizacion Facial alongside doctors from around the world. She listens to tarot readers. She watches Spanish films. She is, as she has always been, still becoming.
Dr Bonnie Rae, DMD practices dental aesthetics and sleep medicine in San Miguel de Allende. She is currently accepting new patients and is the only practitioner in the area offering FDA-approved home sleep ring studies for obstructive sleep apnea diagnosis.
Find Dr Bonnie on the EnForma Wellness platform and book a consultation through the EnForma app.
EnForma was born in Mexico. Not inspired by it, not transplanted here — born here, in the salt air and slow mornings and something harder to name that this country does to the people who stay. Raíces is our way of introducing you to the people who know that feeling best: the practitioners who came to Mexico and never left, who built their practices here, who found in this land a deeper expression of the work they were already called to do. Each post in this series is a conversation — about healing, about Mexico, about what it means to root yourself somewhere and let that place change you.
