On January 18, 2018, Guggenheim Award winning filmmaker, Maggie Hadleigh-West, released her new film on thyroid disease - Sick to Death! - available on Amazon and VIMEO. The trailer viewing link is below for your review and I can send the full feature film upon request.
Sick to Death! Feature Film Trailer - https://vimeo.com/152188030
Sick to Death! will not only offer information on thyroid disease, it can help you and your audience learn tips and tools of how to best advocate for your own healthcare needs, while clarifying why so many people go without diagnosis of a chronic condition – often for years and years.
Hadleigh-West can discuss:
- How more than 750 million people around the world have thyroid disease.
- How the chances of having thyroid disease radically increases with age.
- Tips and tools patients can use to advocate for themselves with their doctor.
- How to spot the signs of thyroid disease in yourself or someone you love.
- How the commonly prescribed drugs for thyroid disease -- seen as the gold standard - are under treating 90% of people that suffer with thyroid disease.
- The challenges women face as independent filmmakers and how they continue to make films to change the world.
If you need additional information or would like to interview filmmaker Maggie Hadleigh-West, please call or email with your request. We can send links to the full feature film, give out clips for websites or have Maggie write guest blogs / columns on thyroid awareness and how to advocate for your healthcare needs.
Johanna J. Ramos-Boyer | JRB Communications, LLC | Office: 703-646-5137
About Sick to Death!
Thyroid disease, and its accompanying symptoms and related disorders, is a very confusing health challenge. The purpose of the Sick to Death! project is to create a resource for health seekers that can assist in confirming that what they are experiencing may in fact be thyroid disease. With the assistance of a huge community, the Sick to Death! project seeks to improve the medical establishment’s response to thyroid disease.
In Sick to Death! Hadleigh-West exposes AbbVie Pharmaceuticals and their drug Synthroid, one of the most profitable and most commonly prescribed drugs for thyroid disease - yet it under treats 90% of people that suffer with this illness. Patients are rarely given options for treatment or even told that there might be a more effective treatment. Sick to Death! uncovers the often ineffective TSH test which leaves millions of people without proper diagnosis for their chronic illness.
Sick to Death! won three Global Film Awards 2017 “Impact Docs” awards, and Hadleigh-West received a Guggenheim Award to make the film.
After drinking radioactive iodine to kill her overactive thyroid, filmmaker Maggie Hadleigh-West catapults into illness only to run smack into a complicated medical maze. In Sick to Death! Hadleigh-West exposes her own disturbing, yet determined, thirty-year struggle to regain her spiraling health. After seeing hundreds of doctors who either disregarded her symptoms, misdiagnosed or under treated her, Maggie discovers that her life-long thyroid problem was a fully understood medical issue as early as 1914, yet it’s been obscured by systemic medical corruption, pharmaceutical greed, and physician negligence, leaving more than 750 million people sick and suffering world-wide.
About Maggie Hadleigh-West
In 1991 Maggie Hadleigh-West made the very first film on sexual harassment in public called War Zone which garnered world-wide attention and completed a first feature of the same name in 1998. Sick to Death! is her fourth film and second documentary. Hadleigh-West is a 2017 Impact Doc Awards winner, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow Award Winner, 2010 Indie Fest: Audience Impact Merit Award Winner, 2010 Accolade Merit Award Winner, 2009, 2006, and 2005 Alcyon Foundation Fellow, a 2004 New York State Council on the Arts Fellow, 2001 University of Louisville Distinguished Professor Nominee, 2000 Rockefeller Fellow Nominee and a 1998 Berlin Film Festival Caligari Nominee.
Hadleigh-West lives in New Orleans.
