"...First Do No Harm"
by Jim Abrahams
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Actor: Allison Janney, Fred Ward, Margo Martindale, Meryl Streep, Seth AdkinsDirector: Jim Abrahams
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
Producer: Meryl Streep
Cinematographer: Pierre Letarte
Producer: Jim Abrahams
Producer: Alda Neves
Producer: Howard Braunstein
Producer: Michael Jaffe
Writer: Ann Beckett
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-09-03
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Walt Disney Video
Product features:
- Award-winning actress Meryl Streep (Best Actress, SOPHIE'S CHOICE, KRAMER VS. KRAMER, THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY) delivers a powerful and uplifting performance in this story of one family's strength and courage in a time of extreme crisis. Plunged into emotional and financial hardship, a devoted mother (Streep), a hardworking father (Fred Ward -- CHAIN REACTION, CORKY ROMANO) and the re
DVD Reviews of "...First Do No Harm"
DVD 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.
Description of "...First Do No Harm"
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