Do No Harm

“Do No Harm” follows four people bonded by tragedy on a mission to expose medicine’s dirty secret. Doctors and medical students pull back the curtain on the causes and cover-up of the alarming rate of suicide of physicians, the highest rate among all professions and almost twice the general population. At a time when we’re facing an unprecedented doctor shortage, more than one million patients lose their doctors to suicide every year yet because of the stigma of suicide, it’s often covered up.

In “Do No Harm” by two-time Emmy winning producer, Robyn Symon, we learn that suicide is just the tip of the iceberg; a symptom of a much larger crisis in medicine, an epidemic of depression, drug abuse, sleep deprivation and burnout that begins in medical school with cutthroat competition, bullying, mounting student debt trapping students in a system only gets worse. The irony is that you would think the medical community would hold itself to a higher standard when it comes to the health well being of its own- but in fact the opposite is true. The internal and external pressures facing physicians today are too often ignored. But the dysfunction not only compromises the well-being of physicians – the film connects the link between a toxic medical system to the high rate medical errors. Today medical mistakes, from a range of causes, result in the preventable deaths of more than 250,000 people every year, making it the 3rd leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer to which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders asks, “Why isn’t this on the front page of the papers every single day?”