The Widowmaker movie review & film summary (2015)
According to the CDC, an estimated 610,000 people die annually of heart disease (that's 1 in 4 deaths), and an estimated 735,000 Americans die every year of a heart attack. Heart disease is the #1 killer in both men and women in this country. While there are definitely lifestyle adjustments one can make to lessen the chance of developing heart disease (exercise, diet, etc.), the disease does not discriminate. Perfectly healthy people also "drop dead." The left coronary artery is known as the "widowmaker": if it malfunctions, sudden death can be the result. Forbes has woven through the documentary various personal stories from families who have lost a loved one, suddenly, from heart attacks. The stories are told simply, with old photographs and home-movie footage accompanying the narration, and the tone overall is one of confused loss. The person was healthy, the person played softball, the person was only 35 ... family members struggle to make sense of what happened. There are also interviews with people who have had heart attacks and survived (including Larry King who says that the pain is "excruciatingly hard to explain.")
The development of various technologies to both prevent and stop heart attacks makes up the bulk of "The Widowmaker," and fascinating stuff it is. We meet Julio Palmaz, a radiologist from Argentina, living outside San Francisco, who worked in his garage on a kind of mesh tube that could be inserted into arteries to hold them open. This would eventually be known as the "stent," the most common interventionist technology used today to stop heart attacks. The problem with the stent is that the person needs to be in the hospital already, heart attack already in process, and, as shown repeatedly in the documentary, millions don't make it that far. What of the man struggling for breath in his driveway? He has minutes to live. Is there a way to prevent heart attacks before they arrive? Is there a way to predict a heart attack before it happens? This is where the development of the Coronary Calcium Scanning comes in, a process that checks for build-up of calcium in the arteries, a sure sign of the development of heart disease. The doctors involved in the Calcium Scanning technology became known as "The Calcium Club," and they were marginalized and dismissed, for years, in favor of the Stent.
Stents are paid for per procedure, and so hospitals love them, and overuse them, doctors got rich on their stent expertise, and prevention technology ended up being sidelined, in an official and unofficial manner. There's no money to be made in prevention. Forbes walks us through this extremely fraught and involved scientific landscape, where tempers still run high, with people sniping at one another in their interviews. One guy refers to the calcium scan proponents as a "cult." Rene Oliveira, from the Texas House of Representatives who passed a bill in his state making calcium scans mandatory, said of one of the calcium-scan-naysayers, "He's an idiot and probably still in dinosaur times in terms of his thinking," (A calcium scan saved Oliveira's life.) It is illuminating that the insurance companies mentioned in the film refused to participate in the documentary.
