The Resident, Netflix’s medical series that exposes medical corruption in the US

OPINION.- The Resident, is a Netflix medical series that uncovers medical corruption in the United States. It emerges in January 2018 and its 107 chapters end in 2023. In 6 seasons they build a solid argument from fiction about the poor health ethics of large medical corporations, pharmaceuticals, hospital centers and groups of doctors who only think about billing to make profits.

The interesting thing about the narrative, created by Amy Holden Jones, Haley Schore, and Roshan Sethi, among others, is that it can denounce issues that by passing “only” in the dystopia of the fictional narrative have little chance of being actionable: any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence. However, among its more than 100 chapters are enclosed not inconsiderable approaches to the darkest and most sinister reality of medicine and its business, collected by the screenwriters through conversations held with honest doctors and nurses.

A professor at a university in Oregon recently told me that a student of his had to go to a doctor’s office to get a splinter removed because his “bullshit” insurance did not cover it. In another office they gave him, as if it were a gift, some absorbent cotton and some alcohol so that he could do it himself, something that in the end he had to do without any medical control or the required asepsis. This drama affects millions of students who are dramatically excluded from the healthcare system. Perhaps the Democrats and Republicans should iron out their differences on this issue by sitting down and talking about it.

The Resident, was cancelled in January 2023 with a stable and loyal audience. The producers are clear that such cancellation could have to do with pressure from media groups linked to the most important medical clans of the moment.

One of the most outstanding themes of the first two seasons has to do with cancer and the business behind the supposed remission therapies, one of the doctors at Chastain Park Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, the fictitiously named hospital where the various plots take place, owns a series of centers related to the care of terminally ill cancer patients where chemotherapy is administered. In connection with this issue, in real life, Professor of medicine and drug analysis Peter C. Gotzsche, author of, among other books, How to Survive in an Overmedicated World, tells the story of a 64-year-old relative of his with metastatic pancreatic cancer, diagnosed as incurable, who was willing, like so many other patients when informed of their condition, to do everything possible to try to live a little longer, …he underwent twenty-seven radiation treatments in Denmark, after consulting a different doctor each time. He then underwent surgery in Germany, thanks to an agreement between two hospitals, one Danish and one German, where an experimental treatment was used on him where the doctor who treated him …experimented by mixing white blood cells with the cancer cells and reintroducing them into the patient by monthly injections to strengthen his immune system. This last treatment, which was implemented after the intervention in Germany was not free and each injection cost a bundle. A year and a half after starting this journey, Peter’s relative passed away. Doctors have always affirmed with him and other patients that every chemo treatment prolongs life (1).

In different parts of the world, not only in the USA, health authorities approve cancer drugs without knowing exactly what the results of their application will be. All this causes a great deal of expense to the health system and to the patients and families themselves, often leaving them with substantial debts. Who wins? The pharmaceutical companies that make these compounds and a series of medical commission agents and hospitals that, by applying them indiscriminately to extend the patient’s life for a few months, receive large incomes or huge profits. The Resident, in a masterful way, shows us the corruption we are describing in a surprising visual form.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield published in the 2010s a rigorous study, where apparently the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) in the United States, would have decided to hide – with the help of corrupt scientists and medical associations, laboratories and media linked to power – the relationship between mercury in vaccines and various neural pathologies – especially in children. He was professionally prosecuted for carrying out this study. Some time later, Dr. William W. Thomson, CDC epidemiologist, who participated in the concealment, admitted that it had been real (2).

Throughout the planet, studies on the dangerousness of the drugs we take, even if they are usually taken without a prescription and without consulting our pharmacists, are constantly being disseminated . Let us not forget that pharmacies are stores that sell products and that with each pill they give us, they make money. In my case, I am hypertensive and when we managed to find the little pill that could help me lower my blood pressure, after three attempts, the first thing my family doctor advised me was not to read the indications of the side effects it could produce. However, to give us an idea, without going into the subject, which I will develop further, Joan Ramón-Laporte, Professor of Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), commented in his book Chronicle of an intoxicated society …How do adverse effects manifest themselves? What are the diseases caused by drugs? And behind these two simple questions he began to make an extensive list of which I will only mention a few lines: …hives, stomach pain, diarrhea, dizziness, loss of balance, amnesia, tachycardia, sweating, choking sensation, infection, heart attack, stroke, depression, falls, fractures, cancer… Practically all pathologies can be caused by drugs ( 3).

We may not be aware of where what we read leads us, but if we are diagnosed with a condition, whatever it may be, and we are medicated more, we are entering a wheel where our system deteriorates and becomes weaker and weaker. Falling, then, into the wheel of overmedication is easy and it could end our own lives.

The Resident, the series we are talking about, emphasizes, as did the mythical series House, on diagnosis. Are we well diagnosed with what we have? Taxatively no. Returning to Peter C. Gotzsche’s book How to Survive in an Overmedicated World, in its introduction he leaves us the following paragraph that should be engraved in the hearts of patients who regularly visit their doctors: I wish patients who leave all decisions in the hands of their doctors the best of luck, because they will need it. Doctors make numerous errors of judgment, often because they are ignorant and use too many medications. We live in a world so over-diagnosed and over-treated that, in the richest countries, they are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Peter also comments that it has been found that medical errors, such as those due to medication and other reasons, are the third leading cause of death in the world even if we count only hospital deaths, most of which are preventable.

In short, the series The Resident, from the Netflix platform, narrates somber aspects about the world of medicine, of course without overloading to the extreme the denunciation, impossible in a society where the control of large corporations through their lobbies is part of the entertainment industry and the media, thus controlling part of what is said, how it is said and when it is said. Although the latter is not only the case in the United States.

(1 and 3) Como sobrevivir a un mundo sobremedicado, by Peter C. Gotzsche, Roca Editorial de Libros, S.L. ISBN: 9788417541552
(2) Discovery DSALUD, nº 177 – December 2014