“Demand & Supply”Short Film 10 of 50 in the LIFE Before Death documentary series about the global crisis in untreated pain and the dramatic life changing effect palliative care services can deliver to patients and their families around the world. In this Short Film we discover that millions of people are dying with pain everyday around the world and that part of the reason they are not receiving treatment is due to a lack of commercial incentive for big pharmaceutical companies. “If you were to ask yourself at the end of your own life — if you were dying and you were in pain — how long you would be willing to wait for somebody to come and deal with your pain,” reflects hospice activist Eugene Murray (Ireland). “It would be minutes or hours, but for these people it’s very often never.” In Kampala, Uganda, Dr Henry Ddungu introduces us to pediatric patient Wasswa who has advanced Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphoid tissue, who had been experiencing severe pain. It wasn’t until Wasswa was treated with oral morphine that his pain subsided and he could get back to the important business of being a kid — running around, playing, sleeping, expressing affection to his mother. However his family are now concerned that Wasswa’s pain will return due to a country-wide shortage of morphine in Uganda and surrounding countries. We discover that there is a great unmet need for morphine in Uganda. “Wasswa is one of the lucky few,” explains Dr Ddungu. “It’s kind of …
Video Rating: 4 / 5