Netflix "Afflicted" - ME included

[Yann04]

Defamation Lawsuit Against Netflix Over ‘Afflicted’ Docuseries Allowed to Proceed

A state appellate court has turned down Netflix’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought by subjects of docuseries Afflicted who say they were defamed when the show misrepresented their chronic illnesses.​

In a unanimous decision from the Second Appellate District, the panel ruled that the consent releases the subjects signed aren’t enforceable because they were lied to and pressured to waive their rights not to be defamed. It found that plaintiffs can pursue claims over misrepresentations in the documentary that “were reasonably susceptible to an interpretation that defendants were portraying [their] illnesses, and accompanying physical symptoms, as not the result of any underlying, diagnosable medical condition, but rather as either the product of [their] imaginations or some mental disorder.”​

Click the link in the title for the whole article.

Apparently it was dropped a year later…

‘Afflicted’ Subjects Drop Defamation Lawsuit Against Netflix; Alleged That Docuseries Painted Them As “Crazy Hypochondriacs” – Update

https://deadline.com/2023/06/netflix-sued-affliction-documentary-defamation-fraud-1202664068/

 

[rvallee]

While public discourse often describes these activities as a potentially dangerous rejection of medical authority

Attribution to a vague "public discourse" does a disservice here, twice over, in that it's the complete opposite, described by the people doing exactly that (not in the thesis, I mean in general, this discourse originates from and perpetuates out of the medical profession, injected into public awareness).

We obviously don't reject medicine, medicine rejects us. Explicitly. Hence why the most common complaint is that we keep going to see them. It's all over their literature, damnit. It's actually very simple, and very important to point out. Especially as this problem is systemic. A similar framing of AIDS activists could just as easily have described them as rabid terrorists, when they were actually reacting in a perfectly rational way to being literally left to suffer and die. And they did far more extreme things than we ever even thought of. Rightfully, I might add.

The root cause problem here is that it completely ignores the agency of the medical profession, which makes those choices explicitly and without shame or concern for consequences, so confident that they are in being correct that they don't bother further than simply stating they are correct and that's final. All of this is a choice. They do explicitly reject us, it's a strictly one-way rejection. It's not a feeling, and it's certainly not us who reject them, this idea is QAnon level of ridiculous, it flies in the face of literally all evidence.

Plus the weird psychobehavioral stuff isn't even medicine, so it makes even less sense. It's just weird ideology and superstitions, make a mockery of the goal and intent of medicine.

Thus, the effort to improve circumstances by seeking to broaden public awareness and empathy may in fact further obscure the structural causes and consequences of complex chronic illnesses.

This is not on the public. The public has nothing whatsoever to do with this. This is 100% the fault and responsibility of the medical profession. They are the ones lacking in empathy, and professionalism, and basic ethics. They make horrible choices imposed on us, entirely devoid of all empathy, and those have terrible consequences, including the general public following on their lead and not giving a damn.