6/11/2023 0 Comments The bleeding edge netflix![]() “Within a month I had an incredible recovery in terms of my psychologic symptoms and ability to think,” Tower said. On the operating table, his surgeon found metal sludge seeping from the device before it was removed. Tower thought it might be related to his metal-on-metal hip replacement and had it redone. So, Tower studied himself until he found the answer in a blood and urine sample: his levels of cobalt, a metal used in rechargeable batteries, were more than a hundred times higher than normal. Tower, his friends and family knew he was in the throes of mental health crisis, but no one was sure why. Stephen Tower, an orthopedic doctor profiled in the film, had developed a tremor and was having a hard time thinking when he decided to scrawl all over the walls and ceiling of a hotel room during a medical conference, eventually using soap as ink. Doctors, too, come forward afflicted by the unknown effects of some of these devices. The Bleeding Edge opens in theaters and begins streaming on Netflix this Friday.Dozens of people speak about issues that followed procedures involving medical devices, including women whose intestines fell out of their bodies after robotic surgery. It may not make you fear your doctor - and nor should it - but you will likely find yourself asking a lot more questions before going under the knife. ![]() The Bleeding Edge might sound alarmist and anti-business, a leftist polemic against Trump and his policies, and even medical innovation itself. On the contrary, it's so well reported and sourced that it transcends partisan politics to objectively emphasize, through statistics and testimonials, the long-term costs of prioritizing short-term gains over the wellbeing of millions of people. Good for industry, but very, very risky for patients. Under President Trump, the FDA has slashed regulations even further, so that medical devices can make it to the market faster. "No no no, the medical device industry has much more power than pharma." Or, in the more nefarious words of Scott Whitaker, CEO of the lobbying group Advanced Medical Technology Association, "We have more power in this room than most governments around the world." Whitaker delivered that claim as a boast, during his keynote at an industry conference, as mostly aging, white men sat in the audience, nodding.Īnd things aren't getting any better. "People think pharma's got power," says the journalist Jim Spencer in the film. Michael Carome, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group, amount to a $300 billion industry. Moreover, medical devices, according to Dr. The FDA, according to numerous insiders interviewed for The Bleeding Edge, maintains far looser standards for medical devices than it does for drugs, food or anything else that enters our bodies, in part because of some eyebrow-raising affiliations between the FDA and the very medical device manufacturers it purports to oversee. Some of these women have fought to get Essure taken off the market, with success throughout Europe, but it remains on the market in the U.S., where lobbying groups wield enormous power in Washington, particularly at the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA. Secondary subjects in the film report that they were instructed during Essure's clinical trials to indicate that they were "very satisfied" with the procedure merely because they had not gotten pregnant the bleeding and pain and tremors were seen as incidental. While complications like these are rare, and acknowledged by the manufacturers, they may not be as rare we we're led to believe. But the device can break and fragment, migrate into other parts of the reproductive system, and cause everything from autoimmune disease to neurologic disorders. The other three are all women who received the vaginal contraceptive Essure, from Bayer, which is supposed to trigger inflammation in the fallopian tubes, causing them to scar and seal shut, permanently. ![]() Removing it was described as being akin to getting bubblegum out of hair, or plying a crowbar out of concrete. One of the film's subjects, an orthopedic surgeon himself, received a hip replacement only to have it disintegrate inside his body and turn the surrounding tissue to pulp. Another is a 40-something mother who got a transvaginal mesh implant after experiencing urinary incontinence following the birth of her daughter the mesh melded with her organs and caused excruciating pain and abdominal bleeding.
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