Hacker Cinema
The Forgotten Plague
2015 · Film · documentary · 60 min
Directed by Chana Gazit
Tuberculosis is the deadliest killer in human history, responsible for one in four deaths for almost two centuries. While it shaped medical pursuits, social habits, economic development and public policy, TB and its impact are poorly understood.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Careful making any conclusions from that show. A number of the participants have said they were totally misrepresented.
You could tell they were going to slant things right from the start when they started first with introducing Bekah and her quirky “witch” and “psychic” beliefs, before even getting to the diagnostics or how they were diagnosed. The documentary makers definitely crossed some ethical lines by cutting in that doctor talking answering general prompts about psychological illness, and splicing that in with patients answering questions about their emotional state, etc.
One thing it was good for though was to see just how horribly taken advantage of desperate and sick people can be by quacks. The show featured a lot of quacks such as Suzanne Kim and the Sophia Institute and that lady on Marthas Vineyard. I really wish I had the hours of material they left out to produce a documentary on what these quacks prescribed and charged their clients.
Edit: I’ll say on the subject of Jamison for example, if you want a better documentary on ME/CFS take a look at Unrest, also on Netflix. (And Forgotten Plague I think on Prime.) But even that science has progressed a long way in the past couple of years since that came out.
For anyone interested the PBS Documentary show American Experience had a fantastic episode on TB a month or two ago called "The Forgotten Plague" (although they do talk a bit about how it's coming back thanks to drug resistance at the end).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/plague/