Focus on Clinical Research, Episode 1: The Johns Hopkins Story (2020)

The Clinic

A weary-looking middle-aged couple shuffle around their cluttered loft in Yangon, Myanmar. There is stuff everywhere, and a mountain of pills in blister packs lie haphazardly on top of a glass case. The loft turns out to be a clinic and the couple are qualified doctors. They are also artistic: she paints and draws, he is making a feature film, and their patients receive creative therapy in addition to regular treatment. This might not be a sterile, efficient hospital full of white coats, and the treatment rooms might look shabby, but there is real time and attention for people here.

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy

Follow filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as she creates an intimate portrait of her community and the impacts of the substance use and overdose epidemic. Witness the change brought by community members with substance-use disorder, first responders and medical professionals as they strive for harm reduction in the Kainai First Nation.

You Don't Back Down

In Nigeria, a young Canadian doctor serves in a local mission hospital and learns much from the experience. Stationed abroad under the Canadian University Service Overseas Plan, Dr. Alex McMahon and his schoolteacher wife find every day a fresh challenge. An interesting study of intercultural help.

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life explores the life and work of the legendary neurologist and storyteller, as he shares intimate details of his battles with drug addiction, homophobia, and a medical establishment that accepted his work only decades after the fact. Sacks was a fearless explorer of unknown mental worlds who helped redefine our understanding of the brain and mind, the diversity of human experience, and our shared humanity.

Sicko

A documentary about the corrupt health care system in The United States who's main goal is to make profit even if it means losing people’s lives. "The more people you deny health insurance the more money we make" is the business model for health care providers in America.

A Matter of Life and Death: History of Hygiene

Hygienic habits are as old as the various human civilizations; but each era establishes its own customs: whether private or public, everywhere and at all times, methods of personal cleanliness have depended on cultural conventions, religious morals, political ideologies and economic interests; because the control of basic hygiene has also been and is one more tool in the infinite exercise of power over the masses.

Dosed 2: The Trip of a Lifetime

Laurie, a terminally ill cancer patient and loving mother of four, is granted the right to legally use magic mushrooms to treat her end of life anxiety. She then embarks on a remarkable journey of personal transformation and healing while exploring lesser known possible cures for cancer, like cannabis oil.

The Last Shaman

James, giving himself 12 months before he has "a license to kill himself," sets off to the Amazon rainforest with hopes of finding a shaman who can save his life.

Clínica de Migrantes: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Puentes de Salud is a volunteer-run clinic that provides free medical care to undocumented immigrants in south Philadelphia. Here, doctors and nurses work for free to serve people who would otherwise fall through the cracks. Clinica de Migrantes, a potent film by Maxim Pozdorovkin, follows the workers and patients of Puentes through months of routine care and growth. Along the way, the film puts a face to the millions of people who exist on the margins of society: people displaced from their homelands, separated from their families, unfamiliar with the customs, unable to obtain health insurance and terrified to come forward to seek medical help. Along with revealing these patient stories, Clinica is also a look at the heroic doctors and nurses who work pro bono to ensure these people receive care, offering a deeply moving look at the limitless potential of humanity.

Emergency Ward

This 1959 documentary short is a frank portrait of the daily operations inside the Montreal General Hospital’s emergency ward.

The Connection

The Connection is a film about how frontier research is proving that there is a direct connection between your mind and your health.

Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics

Celebrities recall their most mind-bending trips via animations, reenactments and more in this comedic documentary exploring the story of psychedelics.

Faceless

Faceless is a documentary film about the workings of an inpatient psychiatry unit, seen through the eyes of both the patients trying to get well and the staff trying to help them.

Emma Wants to Live

This is a Dutch documentary about the last weeks of life in a Portuguese clinic for Emma Caris, a 18 year old girl who had been suffering anorexia nervosa since she was 16 years old.

Die rätselhafte Krankheit – Leben mit ME/CFS

ME/CFS is a devastating disease that affects around 300,000 people in Germany alone. There has been little help for sufferers to date. Many doctors are not familiar with the clinical picture and treat it incorrectly. However, something has been happening recently, partly due to the coronavirus pandemic: because the late effects of Covid-19 correspond to the typical symptoms of ME/CFS...

My Dead Body

The extraordinary moving story of Toni Crews, a young mum with a rare terminal cancer who charted her illness online before donating her body for medical research and public dissection.

What About ME?

Inside the dramatic search for a cure to ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). 17 million people around the world suffer from what ME/CFS has been known as a mystery illness, delegated to the psychological realm, until now. A scientist in the only neuro immune institute in the world may have come up with the answer. An important human drama, plays out on the quest for the truth.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule

THE SPIRIT MOLECULE weaves an account of Dr. Rick Strassman's groundbreaking DMT research through a multifaceted approach to this intriguing hallucinogen found in the human brain and hundreds of plants, including the sacred Amazonian brew, ayahuasca. Utilizing interviews with a variety of experts to explain their thoughts and experiences with DMT, and ayahuasca, within their respective fields, and discussions with Strassman’s research volunteers, brings to life the awesome effects of this compound, and introduces us to far-reaching theories regarding its role in human consciousness.

Beyond LSD

Educational film for parents to discuss LSD with their children.

Salvia Divinorum: A Western Approach

Salvia Divinorum is an often misunderstood and powerful psychedelic plant used by the Mazatec shamans in southern Mexico for centuries. This entheogen's mysteries are thoroughly explored, by Director Erin Wyche, from an American view point.

The Nature of Things: The Antibiotic Hunters

Dr. David Suzuki explains how antibiotics have been over prescribed for decades and it has led to the fact that now there are bacterial infections that are resistant to them, and people are dying by the thousands.

Santé mentale, briser le tabou

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The Fantastical World of Hormones with Professor John Wass

Expert John Wass presents a documentary telling the story of how hormones were discovered and remain at medicine's cutting edge as we try to deal with modern scourges like obesity.

The Substance: Albert Hofmann's LSD

By coincidence rather than by design, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann makes a sensational discovery in the spring of 1943. He realizes that he is dealing with a powerful molecule that will have an impact that reaches far beyond the scientific world. THE SUBSTANCE is an investigation into our troubled relationship with LSD, told from its beginnings to today.

The Source Family

A feature documentary film set in Hollywood, examining a radical experiment in '70s utopian living. The Source Family were the darlings of the Sunset Strip until their communal living, outsider ideals and spiritual leader Father Yod's 13 wives became an issue with local authorities. They fled to Hawaii, leading to their dramatic demise.

Penicillin: A Medical Revolution

In the summer of 1928, the Scottish physician Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident, but it would take two more decades and a world war before he and others succeeded in producing the antibiotic in such large quantities as to eradicate the epidemics of the time: typhus, syphilis, gangrene and tuberculosis.

AstraZeneca: A Vaccine for the World?

BBC medical editor Fergus Walsh examines the extraordinary ambition behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid jab. Intended as a vaccine for the world, did politics get in its way?

End Game

Filmed and edited in intimate vérité style, this movie follows visionary medical practitioners who are working on the cutting edge of life and death and are dedicated to changing our thinking about both.

Die Wahrheit über die Lüge

Everyone lies, even several times a day. Although this is considered immoral, it seems to be an ancient natural habit. Animals also tell lies for their own benefit. And not every lie is to be condemned. Some are considered a lubricant for daily coexistence. Scientists are trying to track down liars with lie detectors and thermal imaging cameras.

Perfecting the Art of Longing

Cut off from his loved ones due to the strict COVID-19 lockdown at the long-term care facility where he lives, a quadriplegic rabbi is filmed by his daughter while reflecting on love, mortality and longing.

Orange Sunshine

The never-before-told story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love – a spiritual group of surfers and hippies in Southern California that became the largest suppliers of psychedelic drugs in the world during the 1960s and early 1970s. Bonded by their dreams to fight social injustice and spread peace, this unlikely band of free-spirited idealists quickly transformed into a drug-smuggling empire and at the same time inadvertently invented the modern illegal drug trade. At the head of the Brotherhood, and the heart of this story, is the anti-capitalistic husband and wife team, who made it their mission to change the world through LSD.

The Song That Calls You Home

A personal, scientific, mystical exploration of Amazonian curanderismo, focus on Ayahuasca and Master Plants, their healing and visionary properties and risks, along with the Shipibo people and their songs.

Höhenrausch – Die Entwicklung der Höhenmedizin

How do you brave acute mountain sickness? We talk to researchers, doctors and mountaineers about a syndrome whose mechanisms are still poorly understood.

Music for Mushrooms

An associate of Ram Dass, East Forest explores how music and psychedelics can facilitate transformative healing through the blending of shamanistic practices with guided psychedelic experiences.

The Virus Within Us

They are the most common creatures on earth. They have been around forever and are considered dangerous and deadly - but they are much more than that. Around 50 percent of our DNA comes from viruses.

The Mayo Clinic

The Mayo Clinic tells the story of a unique medical institution that has been called a "Medical Mecca," the "Supreme Court of Medicine," and the "place for hope where there is no hope." The Mayo Clinic began in 1883 as an unlikely partnership between the Sisters of Saint Francis and a country doctor named William Worrall Mayo after a devastating tornado in rural Minnesota. Since then, it has grown into an organization that treats more than a million patients a year from all 50 states and 150 countries. Dr. Mayo had a simple philosophy he imparted to his sons Will and Charlie: "the needs of the patient come first." They wouldn't treat diseases...they would treat people. In a world where healthcare delivery is typically fragmented among individual specialties, the Mayo Clinic practices a multi-specialty, team-based approach that has, from its beginnings, created a culture that thrives on collaboration.

Unrest

When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s "all in her head." Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families' stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot.

Neurons to Nirvana

Through interviews with leading psychologists and scientists, Neurons to Nirvana explores the history of four powerful psychedelic substances (LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA and Ayahuasca) and their previously established medicinal potential. Strictly focusing on the science and medicinal properties of these drugs, Neurons to Nirvana looks into why our society has created such a social and political bias against even allowing research to continue the exploration of any possible positive effects they can present in treating some of today's most challenging afflictions.

The Psychedelic Experience

Experimental movie, where a man comes home and experiences LSD. His kaleidoscopic visions follow, with readings inspired by the Tibethan Book of the Dead.

Psyched Out

A documentary about psychedelics and psychedelic experiences

Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh

In 1951, a woman died in Baltimore, U.S.A. She was called Henrietta Lacks. These are cells from her body. They were taken from her just before she died. They have been growing and multiplying ever since. There are now billions of these cells in laboratories around the world. If massed together, they would weigh 400 times her original weight. These cells have transformed modern medicine, but they also became caught up in the politics of our age.

Nurse Unseen

Explores the little-known history and humanity of the unsung Filipino nurses risking their lives on the front lines of a pandemic, thousands of miles from home.

Fascinating Fasciae: The Hidden World Under Our Skin

Fasciae, hidden connective tissues, are largely unstudied parts of our anatomy. What role do they play in the organism? And could a better understanding of them help in finding a cure for back pain?

The Science Of Fasting

While life expectancy is increasing in Western countries, cases of diabetes, hypertension, obesity and cancer are increasing, and the use of medication has exploded. Does this mean that in order to live to a ripe age we are condemned to swallow more and more drugs? What if there was another way? For half a century, in Russia, Germany and the U.S., doctors and biologists have been exploring a different therapeutic approach: fasting. The results are amazing. Soviet researchers have provided a body of clinical studies of exceptional health…only published in Russian, and thus unknown in the West. Young biologists from the University of Los Angeles have overturned conventional wisdom and used molecular biology to demonstrate the powerful effects of fasting. This research suggests a wide-ranging potential, which could include treatments for the disease of the century, cancer. If these scientists are right, maybe our approach to disease and treatment will need a rethink.