COMPLICATED
COMPLICATED
CHILDREN Suffering at the Margins of Medicine
Kids with rare and complex diseases whose care is too complicated for mainstream medicine are being tossed around from specialist to specialist, abandoned and even accused of psychological disorders or of faking their illness. They often live with chronic pain and other symptoms, but are unable to get the help they need because they are considered too medically complex, or financially and legally risky—or, worse, because they or their parents may not be believed in the first place.
COMPLICATED focuses on one of the most prevalent of these conditions, a connective-tissue disease called Ehler’s-Danlos syndrome (EDS), which creates multi-systemic challenges for patients and physicians. Disabling and in some cases fatal, EDS is estimated to afflict about 1-in-500 people worldwide (so it may not be a rare disease after all). What differentiates EDS and other related illnesses is their invisibility—a lack of awareness and accurate diagnostics—and the perilous medical and legal maze in which pediatric patients, their families, and even the doctors who agree to treat them, find themselves adrift.
Desperately seeking multiple opinions and specialists, many parents of “complicated” kids (especially mothers) are suspected of over-medicalizing their children and risk being charged with medical child abuse, and losing custody or parental rights.
COMPLICATED takes the viewer into the hidden world of children coping and trying to live their lives with rare, complex and invisible illnesses, parents facing impossible choices to help them, and providers who dismiss them as "too complicated" or risk it all to save them.
(86. min)
Coming Soon!
“There’s nobody that understands our conditions, because they’re so rare and they’re so complicated. I wouldn’t be on hospice right now if it weren’t for a lot of things going on in my medical care due to not being listened to and not being believed.”