"...First Do No Harm"
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Movie Reviews of "...First Do No Harm"
Movie Review: First Do No Harm
Summary: 5 Stars
The movie got here so fast! Was very pleased with the price and the service. Hope to do buisness with you in the future.Movie Review: First Do No Harm
Summary: 5 Stars
Every medical doctor shoud see this movie. Health does not come from a bottle of pills. It comes from within.Movie Review: First and last
Summary: 4 Stars
I could relate my own case to this movie. Mine is not that of a parent, like those played in the movie, but of a fifty something year old trying to get better.
The child in the film is helpless and very young, so parents advocate for him. Meryl Streep is her usual sterling self, playing this role with extreme amounts of empathy, interacting with husband, doctors, and others helping with her battle, or fighting similar ones.
Unlike Lorenzo's Oil, the urgency of a dying child is absent from this plot. Instead, there is the effort to try to achieve some kind of normalcy, for a child going through precious times that can never be recovered. What happens to him now will affect all of his future quality of life, and Streep plays a mother who knows it.
The message is that you can sometimes still play, having been dealt a bad hand, but don't expect it to come without sweat and tears. One painful moment occurs when a child afflicted similarly to her own, dies, possibly from a treatment being tried on him.
The tears come easily for me, because, as a bonus with my illness, I have what they call "pseudo-bulbar affect", which is a tendency to laughter or tears that cannot be controlled. Dextromethorphan syrup helps. This is a film to be careful of, in my situation. The situation is one where a mother is forced into a very unfeeling, uncaring, and sometimes even sadistic medical system. This happens when her husband is laid off and loses his medical insurance coverage. The insurance company is one of the ones Barack Obama was talking about, when he decried the often-used excuse of "pre-existing illness", denying health-care to the insured.
She finds herself in a hostile system that would rather experiment on her child with poisonous drugs than try to fix his problem. The nightmare is that this scenario is not uncommon at all. Doctors are trained to "first do no harm", but they have a very hard time with the actual fulfillment of that promise. When they are unable to bring someone back from whatever they consider to be the brink, and they have "given up" trying to repair a person, they feel no compunction about sacrificing whatever may be left on the altar of science. Consequently, opportunities for real help are lost, and harm is done. In many cases, harm may be done, simply by omission.
Perhaps Hippocrates should have said, "first do no harm, and last, never give up." But doctors/scientists, as in this film, will always trot out the need for 'more study', with 'randomized placebo-controlled' clinical trials to test any promising treatment, which may take many years, and find out nothing useful to the participant. They may do so only to make the drug market more fair to the existing drug manufacturers, who will lose if a better treatment (or 'cure') is found. These studies allow doctors and drug companies to stay out of court, but they are often completely incompatible with the practice of medicine. This film, along with "Lorenzo's Oil", have been called a 'genre', but they are just tear-jerkers, which may elicit more tears because they are based on true stories.
Movie Review: Healing is often in natural products
Summary: 4 Stars
This story tells us that healing is often in natural products. Taking a lot of medicines is not always the way 'the cure'. Being aware of what we eat and drink. So I see this story not only for those who are sick. Going back to the basic (for example what we eat) can help a lot. A good story with a child acting so bravely.Movie Review: first do no harm
Summary: 4 Stars
This is an excellent movie for anyone in the healthcare field to learn more on ethics. The story is awsome and the actors give their all to tell this increditable story and how the healthcare workers can be wrong and need to listen to the parents who are with their childern more than they are.