THE FINAL FIX

THE FINAL FIX is an incredible, fascinating, entertaining, and hope-engendering documentary about a possible solution to the opioid crisis. In 1998, 6,000 died. In 2017, it was 72,000, with 25 million having an opioid addiction. The movie goes into the reason behind an opioid addiction, why there hasn’t been a solution and follows five addicts in Kentucky who are part of a test program to deliver them from opioid addiction.

Kentucky has one of the highest rates of opioid addiction. The movie opens with the governor of Kentucky, one of the heads of the government addiction services and others, including a mother who lost her son, explaining that in the 1990s the pharmaceutical companies started pushing opioids, which earns them millions of dollars. The movie includes some pharmaceutical TV commercials from the 1990s pushing opioids. By 2018, opioid addictions and deaths were one of the biggest problems facing America today. For instance, opioid deaths are bigger than deaths from heart attacks.

At the same time, the movie reveals a female Scottish doctor, Meg Patterson, who developed a non-pharmaceutical device to help addicts get over their addiction. She called it N.E.T. Doctor Patterson was working as a missionary surgeon in a Hong Kong charity hospital when she made this discovery, and, over the years that followed, Meg and her husband George spent years developing this treatment, dedicating their lives to solving the opioid crisis. After their death, their son-in-law stepped in to run the company. Under this management, progress was made, and the company was filmed testing the device in Kentucky at a respected drug treatment center called Isaiah House.

Five, randomly selected addicts volunteer for the program, one of whom is a very personable African-American, who nonetheless sneaks drugs into the trial and therefore has to leave. After a lot of testing, each one of the volunteers is given their own personal device using N.E.T. (Neural Electric Therapy) to help them overcome their addiction.

A very skeptical doctor and a skeptical member of the government addiction services observe the trial. In the process, they discuss normal withdrawal and how gruesome it is with nausea vomiting, seizures, extreme pain so that very few people get through.

Some people start responding to the N.E.T. treatment immediately, but one needs the device recalibrated, because evidently he was addicted to several different drugs. As they set off through the seven days of the trial, the documentary asks: is this is going to work; can people be cured of serious opioid addictions; will it be as painless and as symptom free as the N.E.T. staff says; and, will this be able to be accepted in the medical community, which makes millions of dollars keeping addicts in treatment for weeks, months and years at a time?

THE FINAL FIX is an excellent, compelling and convincing documentary. Like the skeptical doctor, most people who see it will start out as skeptics themselves, and think it’s going to be just more product promotion, but it is not. It shows the extent of the crisis and then focuses on real people with real addictions who should have better lives. Viewers will empathize with these people. The experts in the documentary discuss the horrors of opioid addiction, such as EMS rescue teams finding people dead in often horrific circumstances, and finding people hyper aggressive, literally out of their minds. However, the violence and addiction are all shown to be bad and never exploited. THE FINAL FIX is a must watch documentary.