#The bleeding edge newsletter movie
#The bleeding edge newsletter series

In that sense, it’s ideally suited for Netflix, which produced and will release the movie worldwide. Dick’s movie might have had deeper resonance if he’d found some defectors from the companies to elucidate their incapacity to these problems, but “The Bleeding Edge” seems less concerned with explaining why these devices come to market than simply calling attention to their harmful effects. Even worse: the absence in the movie of representatives from major household names - including Johnson & Johnson - responsible for developing these devices, all of whom declined to participate. Dick points the finger in part at Scott Gottlieb, the Trump-appointed FDA head who seems to care as much about patient safety as Scott Pruitt cares about the environment. Medical students may find this parade of mortifying tales instructive others will recoil in terror and wonder how the hell any of these procedures remain legal during such technologically-advanced times. Then there’s the story of Tammy Jackson, who endures surgery after surgery once her vaginal mesh (designed to hold itself in place with actual scar tissue) becomes a jumbled mess described to her by one physician as “bubblegum stuck in hair.”īut that shocking description has nothing on the gnarly image of the wiry substance stuck in a bloody mass, or the story of da Vinci patient whose colon fell out. Another devastating drama involves Essure victim Ana Fuentes, who struggles to cope with her mounting medical bills and large family while living a nomadic life. Among the more compelling subjects is Gaby Avina, a former Essure spokesperson who wrote an actual column for the company called “Ask Gaby” singing the praises of the device before - more than a decade after having the device installed herself - joining a protest group of women who suffer from its impact.

“The Bleeding Edge” has a schematic approach that doesn’t exactly make for gripping cinema, but its alarmist tone gives imbues each mini-story with unnerving immediacy. After all, none of these dangerous medical procedures have been stopped by the Food and Drug Administration, an arm of government that operates at the whims of lobbyists and the powerful corporations fueling this $400 billion industry. By deconstructing misleading advertisements that exploit people eager for eager solutions, Dick makes it clear just how easily people can be hoodwinked within the parameters of the law. Through an effective blend of archival footage and the testimony of contemporary experts, the movie lays out the lineage of the industry in postwar America, while rooting it in the present day. 'The Lord of the Rings': Everything You Need to Know About Amazon's Big Money Adaptation Netflix Spent $200 Million on 'The Gray Man' and Got 8 Days at #1īest True Crime Shows on Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Max 'Squid Game' Multiplayer VR Game Will Allow Fans to Compete in Challenges from the Show

Dick lays out each of these conundrums with a series of case studies, while contextualizing within the broader context of the quack medical industry. Patients operated on by the robotic surgeries of the da Vinci System often contend with extensive infections, and others with artificial hips made with chrome-cobalt devices suffer from neurological problems.

The “vaginal mesh” approach yields even more gruesome results. Less cohesive documentary than feature-length red flag, “The Bleeding Edge” assembles a range of talking heads and upsetting case studies to target several key villains: Essure, the permanent contraceptive implant used by millions of women, has left many of them with long-lasting pain and endless surgeries as the small, snake-like device worms its way into the uterus. The latest alarming documentary from “The Invisible War” and “The Hunting Ground” director Kirby Dick is a shocking expose of the medical device industry, and while the stories of the many lives destroyed by technology resonate, the unsettling imagery of the damage caused by those devices goes much further. “ The Bleeding Edge” oscillates between those two extremes. Activism can take many forms - on one extreme, the empirical argument, appealing to reason above all else on the other, the pure visceral nature of an emotional response.

#The bleeding edge newsletter series