Barbara Colvin

There is precious little science in this movie. For instance, they don’t mention that people who use alternative medicine instead of conventional medicine are 2.5 times more likely to die, 6 times more likely if you have one of the more treatable breast cancers. If you want to try alternative medicine along with conventional, go ahead have at it. But it is not true, as the movie claims, that western biomedicine “only treats the symptoms”. When it can, it does try to treat the cause. Sometimes we don’t know the cause. As for being positive and cleaning up your diet, absolutely no harm in that, but I worked on a medical ward and saw many, many people who fought to live using this approach die anyway. My fear is that this film will make people think it’s their fault for being sick. They didn’t clean up their issues, they weren’t positive enough, they didn’t make peace with their daddies, they didn’t use the right woo-woo medicine or they didn’t use it in the right way. Sometimes stuff just happens. This film did not have the courage to challenge its own biases. A few inspirational anecdotes from survivors doesn’t impress me. The epidemiological data tells a different story.