Sick To Death - Press Relese
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! premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival in October 2017 to two sold out shows and was nominated for an audience award. It 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.
Follow Maggie as she brazenly uncovers the medical corruption and negligence that obscures medical practice – only to find yet another disturbing personal revelation. Sick to Death! is both a call-to-action and a quirky film, which seeks to understand and change this disturbing medical reality.
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.
