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

The Dirty War on the NHS

John Pilger unearths the hidden agenda behind the NHS crisis.

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.

Psyched Out

A documentary about psychedelics and psychedelic experiences

Food Matters

With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what's wrong with our malnourished bodies, it's no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide sickness industry and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for curing disease naturally.

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.

The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms

Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.

Emergency Ward

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

Cracking the Code: Phil Sharp and the Biotech Revolution

The 1977 discovery of RNA splicing by Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, Kentucky farm boy turned Nobel-prize winning scientist, set the stage for a revolution in molecular biology, enabling research into a new class of medicines predicated on recombinant DNA techniques ranging from the development of synthetic insulin and human growth hormone to the COVID-19 vaccine.

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.

Toubib

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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...

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.

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.

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.

The Reality of Truth

In this documentary, "Zappy" Zapolin interviews spiritual gurus, celebrities, and people of various faiths about the relationship between spirituality, religion, and psychedelics—in their beliefs and in their experiences.

Untold: Breaking Point

Under pressure to continue a winning tradition in American tennis, Mardy Fish faced mental health challenges that changed his life on and off the court.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Covid, le secret des origines

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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.

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.

Beyond LSD

Educational film for parents to discuss LSD with their children.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Charles III le roi maudit

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My Psychedelic Love Story

An examination of the notorious high priest of LSD Timothy Leary through the eyes of his famed lover Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

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.

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 Weird World of LSD

The 60s equivalent of Reefer Madness and all those other 30s drug exploitation flicks. Apparently, dropping acid leads to stripteases, cat fights, promiscuous sex, playing with kittens, and being convinced your dinner is much larger than it actually is. This is all illustrated in a series of silent sketches accompanied by a droll narrator who seems positively doped out of his mind.

Resistance Fighters – The Global Antibiotics Crisis

The UN General Assembly regards antibiotic-resistance as a "global and most urgent threat". The WHO alarms that we could fall back into a "post-antibiotic age". The film tells us how we got there: It is a story about how negligence, greed, and short-sightedness have rendered the lifesaving effects of antibiotics powerless. It is a science-thriller about disillusioned, fighting doctors, rebellious scientists, patients wrestling with life-threatening diseases and diplomats searching for a global solution. They all are Resistance Fighters.

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.

Triste Trópico

In this "fake documentary", a doctor returns to Brazil after his studies in Paris. Setting out to practice Medicine, he becomes an indigenous messiah and, in time, a cannibal.

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.

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.

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.

Auf der Suche nach Heilern

“I am a hypochondriac”, admits Rosa Von Praunheim, the icon of the gay movement, right at the beginning at the film. The director, who turned seventy in 2012, is afraid of cancer, and he actually suffers from glaucoma, with osteoarthritis in his big toe. Von Praunheim is interested in alternative medicine and goes on a foray into the scene.

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.