TELEVISION REVIEW | ‘FRONTLINE: FACING DEATH’
Postponing the Inevitable vs. Denying the Inevitable
At the Mount Sinai bone marrow transplant unit in New York, Dr. Keren Osman, seated, discusses treatment with a patient.Credit...Courtesy of Frontline
By Ginia Bellafante
Nov. 22, 2010
The latest “Frontline” documentary comes with a blunt, no-one-was-aiming-for-lyricism title: “Facing Death.” The name and the accompanying promotional materials, with an image of a corpselike hand on a hospital bed, suggest a resurrection of the kind of tired and unwinnable debates that surrounded the case of Terri Schiavo. But the film, produced by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor, who paid such elegant tribute to the grim subject of mortuary work in “The Undertaking,” ambitiously explores the complex questions that arise about extending life when a patient is not merely in a persistent vegetative state.
At the heart of the documentary, which was filmed at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and is to be shown Tuesday on PBS, is the issue of modern medicine as both blessing and curse. Aggressive treatments can now keep terminally ill patients alive, often in states of pain and profound misery, for additional weeks or even months, but at great physical, emotional and literal cost. With health care expenses rising, there is obviously much concern about the billions of dollars a year spent on end-of-life care — a subject also recently exhaustively addressed in an article by the physician Atul Gawande in The New Yorker.
Doctors and terminal cancer patients appear in the film navigating the difficult choice between doing more medically, when “more” typically means enhanced pain, and doing less, when “less” means that death comes sooner.
What makes the film difficult to watch is that the dying people featured are typically middle-aged or young, with every incentive to want to keep going and experimenting. “Some physicians can keep giving treatment, and some find it unacceptable, and that, I think, is where the art of science and medicine mix,” Dr. Keren Osman, a doctor in the hospital’s bone marrow transplant unit explains, saying also that with certain patients, she regrets not having stopped treatment earlier, because they suffered unnecessarily.
But, of course, the whole concept of what is and isn’t necessary has so much to do with the psychology of the patient and the family. “Facing Death” is at its most discomfiting when the camera turns to the faces and the conversations of those who don’t show signs of accepting death — when they are telling their spouses that they are going to “beat this.” As one doctor in the film puts it, “Nobody wants to die, and at the same time nobody wants to die badly.”
By Ginia Bellafante
Nov. 22, 2010
The latest “Frontline” documentary comes with a blunt, no-one-was-aiming-for-lyricism title: “Facing Death.” The name and the accompanying promotional materials, with an image of a corpselike hand on a hospital bed, suggest a resurrection of the kind of tired and unwinnable debates that surrounded the case of Terri Schiavo. But the film, produced by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor, who paid such elegant tribute to the grim subject of mortuary work in “The Undertaking,” ambitiously explores the complex questions that arise about extending life when a patient is not merely in a persistent vegetative state.
At the heart of the documentary, which was filmed at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and is to be shown Tuesday on PBS, is the issue of modern medicine as both blessing and curse. Aggressive treatments can now keep terminally ill patients alive, often in states of pain and profound misery, for additional weeks or even months, but at great physical, emotional and literal cost. With health care expenses rising, there is obviously much concern about the billions of dollars a year spent on end-of-life care — a subject also recently exhaustively addressed in an article by the physician Atul Gawande in The New Yorker.
Doctors and terminal cancer patients appear in the film navigating the difficult choice between doing more medically, when “more” typically means enhanced pain, and doing less, when “less” means that death comes sooner.
What makes the film difficult to watch is that the dying people featured are typically middle-aged or young, with every incentive to want to keep going and experimenting. “Some physicians can keep giving treatment, and some find it unacceptable, and that, I think, is where the art of science and medicine mix,” Dr. Keren Osman, a doctor in the hospital’s bone marrow transplant unit explains, saying also that with certain patients, she regrets not having stopped treatment earlier, because they suffered unnecessarily.
But, of course, the whole concept of what is and isn’t necessary has so much to do with the psychology of the patient and the family. “Facing Death” is at its most discomfiting when the camera turns to the faces and the conversations of those who don’t show signs of accepting death — when they are telling their spouses that they are going to “beat this.” As one doctor in the film puts it, “Nobody wants to die, and at the same time nobody wants to die badly.”
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Produced by Frontline with Mead Street Films. Written, directed and produced by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor; Daisy Wright, editor; Lee Wang, field producer; Ben McCoy, director of photography; Steve Roseboom, sound; Will Lyman, narrator.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 23, 2010, Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Postponing the Inevitable Vs. Denying the Inevitable. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Produced by Frontline with Mead Street Films. Written, directed and produced by Miri Navasky and Karen O’Connor; Daisy Wright, editor; Lee Wang, field producer; Ben McCoy, director of photography; Steve Roseboom, sound; Will Lyman, narrator.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 23, 2010, Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Postponing the Inevitable Vs. Denying the Inevitable. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
