For such a serious premise, this show is oddly fun. seeing Alec Baldwin take a step back and tone down his usual brash approach to acting has been a nice change of pace, and letting Christian Slater be the unhinged one makes it a nice Odd Couple feel. This is the true story of two doctors taking down a legitimate nightmare neurosurgeon, Chris Duntsch, who botched so many surgeries and even put people in the morgue that it was astounding he could continue to work. It showed how broken our system has been. Joshua Jackson is particularly great as that doctor, having such an arrogance, you really want him to go down. At the same time, you can see the kernels of a pretty clearly smart mind blinded by his own ego. He should've been a researcher or someone in a lab maybe. But not operating on people...which he saw only as a commodity. Clearly sociopathic and even psychopathic.

I still have 4 episodes left (it's 8 in total) but so far i'm very entertained.

I watched this with my wife last week—good show, the perfect eight episode length. I agree with you that Slater was great in this—he plays the cocky doctor role and lends some comic relief to a very dark subject. And Baldwin was excellent as the serious doctor and it reminded me that he’s really good when not on SNL.

The show also provides some insight into how hospitals make their “real” money, and reveals how this guy was able to hurt so many patients because everyone was more concerned with covering their asses than stopping him. Kind of like a pedo priest, they just kept passing him along.

Dr Death is a podcast based on a dead-trees article about Christopher Duntsch: a neurosurgeon who in his not brief enough and all too recent (i.e., this freaking decade) medical career engaged in "gross malpractice" resulting in serious permanent damage (including turning his best friend into a quadriplegic) to dozens of patients and death to a few.

The main message of Dr Death turns out not to be how Duntsch was this crazy doctor going around possibly intentionally committing malpractice: but how the United States health care establishment provided cover for and enabled Duntsch to continue harming patients.

It took years of complaints, complaints (eventually) even by other physicians, before anything was done to keep Duntsch away from patients. And it was a local reporter who along with a Dallas area DA and not the medical establishment who put an end to Duntsch's criminal malpractice. The disturbing conclusion of Dr Death is that if it had been left solely up to the hospitals, health insurers, state licensing boards, medical schools--all of whom were alerted to Duntsch's incompetence during the course of his practice, not one of whom lifted a finger to put an end to Duntsch's medical malpractice--Duntsch would still be out there performing damaging brain surgeries.

Despite the salacious hook of a murderer in the OR, the lesson of Dr Death isn't that "wow, wasn't he a crazy doctor". It was the U.S. medical system is so bottom-line profit driven that Duntsch, once trained and licensed as a neurosurgeon, was such a valuable commodity to hospitals that after he'd fuck up a few patients at one hospital and that hospital would quietly pay off the damaged patients and send Duntsch packing there was always another hospital willing to hire him and let him operate on patients.

Couple the health-care industry's profit-driven willingness to overlook and enable lack of competence with the conspiracy of silence about mistakes (which makes the popo's blue line look like TMZ in comparison) and you end up with not just Christopher Duntsch killing and permanently disabling patient after patient--but hundreds of thousands of fatal mistakes each year that are buried or quietly paid off by the health care industry.

In terms of addressing safety standards, the U.S. health care system in 2021 is sorta where the U.S. auto industry was when Nader wrote 'Unsafe At Any Speed'. The automakers didn't give a shit about safety because profits were so obscene they could well-afford to pay off customers killed using their product. Just factor the cost of lost-limbs and lost lives into the sticker price, y0.

There are approx 270 million non-unique visits to health-care providers by Americans each year: out-patient office visits (130 mil), ER (100 mil), hospital stays (40 mil). About 1 in 700 of those result in fatalities due to health care provider mistakes (or more, if you only tally unique visits?). The U.S. airline industry flies around 850 million passengers each year, about 3x's as many. If 1.5 million U.S. airline passengers died each year due to pilot fuck ups people would stop flying.

that's the crux of the show, absolutely. and that's what i like so much about it, i think. i already have learned about psychosis enough in these types of stories; i like seeing the side of the medical world that is so afraid of itself that they just let this guy go on.



that's a good analogy. and the kelsey grammer character is like the archbishop who knows more than he wants to let on, so he can't implicate himself.

a thought struck me that what if duntsch was purposely butchering patients to prove his point that surgery isn't necessary when he was pushing his DiscGenics idea. but i haven't seen that (as of yet) brought up.

Finished this tonight. Overall, it was very satisfying. There were a few moments in the courtroom that weren't necessary, and the last episode somewhat dragged. Plus it was kind of odd to have that scene with Dr. Skadden (Grammer) along with what I think were his lawyers, but just cut away and not reference what happened (unless I missed something...)

The performances were exceptional. Grace Gummer is especially good, and she's the daughter of Meryl Streep so it's no surprise. But I also really liked that ADA, AnnaSophia Robb. The obvious heavy hitters are Baldwin, Slater, and Jackson. All of them could be nominated for a lead acting award in either the Emmy's or Golden Globes.

I'd highly recommend, but you will see some gratuitous surgery scenes that even made me squeamish. And I sat through "The Human Centipede" parts I & II.