User Reviews

As many have said I think the focus is wrong in this documentary, but then again I feel like perhaps they just don't have better material or didn't try to find them, so making this woman the focus was easier.

I struggle to believe a medical institute with such reputation and all these surgeons around him did not question a thing. Surely when something this groundbreaking were published other scientists/doctors would have looked into it and checked the viability. It applies to every scientific field and is the rite of passage. Somehow it just didn't happen? That's truly the most unbelievable part.

Was there no papers published? No peer reviews? No one bat an eyelid when experimental procedures this ahead of time was performed on humans? The doctors, the hospitals, are all complicit.

I think it's a brilliantly made documentary for Netflix. After disappointment on top of disappointment lately, this was refreshingly captivating (production/direction wise). My jaw kept dropping at the content, however the most shocking part was the italian woman; is anyone else totally flabbergasted at the fact that she literally fell for the man who killed her son? I mean... no questions asked? No digging deeper?

As for the journalist, I feel for her as she said "love is blind", but if a man ever tells me "do not call there" this would be the first thing I do ! Could've saved her a lot of trouble.

An engrossing 3-part documentary series about a Doctor Death type surgeon who claims he can replace windpipes in humans with plastic. However, he is shown to be a fake and a fraud. But not before many people die horrible deaths due to his lunacy.

A female reporter is charmed by Doctor Death and apparently fooled into making a favorable film about him. Later she realizes she was duped.

This reporter is guilty herself of being romantically involved with Dr Death when she hid her conflict of interest when she was meant to be making an independent film about him.

And I find her outrage concerned more with being duped at the altar rather than her pity for the victims.

Also, guilty other surgeons-who now are meant to be hero's for exposing the crazy- but who ought to have known well before they did that Dr Death was toting junk science.

Shame on them too and the series never addressed or explained their failure to act sooner, so I reduce 2 marks for that:

6/10.

This was a very difficult watch. With all the victims left in Paolo Macchiarini's wake - & there were many - it was the patients, who's hope hung on this charlatan, who were the true victims. To see the film footage of his two-faced haphazard approach to any surgery let alone cutting edge surgery is horrific. It's like seeing a catastrophic car crash, where you know lives are definitely going to be taken, happening in slow motion and the driver of the car is purposely & knowingly driving his passengers off a cliff & he jumps out of the car just as the car veers over the edge to certain death.

I have spent a lot of my adult life in hospitals & undergoing surgery so I have met a lot of Specialists, surgeons, experts in their medical field and it is true that every now and then you come across Doctors who really think their job entitles them to play God but it's rare to meet one who actually believes they ARE God - Paolo Macchiarini is just such a doctor and this is what makes him so very dangerous. Seeing the now deceased patients and their children & families so excited and hopeful to be getting a 'revolutionary' surgical procedure that they were told was going to improve their lives was gut wrenching. Each of their post operative processes was fraught with problem after problem & even with the terrible suffering they were enduring in the face of all these it was clear that this man who promised so much could not even find compassion enough to be honest with his patients, be honest with colleagues, be honest with himself that his grand experiment had been a huge and catastrophic failure. But then narcissists cannot admit defeat or failure and this man is a fully fledged pathological narcissist.

The teams of medical staff and colleagues who placed their entire trust in Macchiarini were not totally off the hook. Even when they saw there were questions & issues, even when they saw flaws in the implants indeed in the actual premise, and repeatedly in the post-op recovery they should have dug deeper and asked the pertinent questions. They did eventually and in an attempt to atone for their involvement, the patients immeasurable cost & the significant way this man had tainted their profession they tried their hardest to alert various organisation heads...but to no avail.

Taking down this man was not helped by the inflated position that had been shaped & created for him by various media outlets who hung on the chance to spread the story of the Dr who was saving lives with his - fabricated - humble demeanour, his - manufactured - passion for his patient's wellbeing and his - fundamentally flawed -medical innovation. Never mind the gapping hole in their due diligence prior to going to air or print, never mind whether their subject and his efforts were actually rooted in truth or fact. They must bear some of the responsibility for his continued harm as they not only continued to feed his already considerable ego but they also publicised his work which in turn helped bring more patients into his lair & onto becoming his medical guinea pigs.

Unsurprisingly Macchiarini's ego & pure fabrication was not just perpetuated in his professional life but also within his private life too. By the end of the documentary you realise just how all-consuming his life of lies had become. While his fakery & bluster was blatant in the medical field - where mistakes & errors cannot just be swept under the rug or easily explained away - it was obvious that in that medical world was where he fed his ego. Then there was his endless stream of fabricated love affairs within his private life, the lies, the grand (unbelievable) stories, the effusive romancing - this was where he had his recreational fun, and yet again true to form it was at the expense of others.

Sadly from my perspective it is pure pain that follows this man, whether it be immense physical pain of his deceived dying patients or the emotional pain of patient's families & his broken hearted lovers, it follows behind him like the hideous stench of his rotting plastic windpipes.

In the end it would take a multifaceted, global approach to bring this duplicitous conman down but what he faced cannot be called 'justice' when compared with the suffering he has unleashed on so many. The fact he had to face a courtroom and eventually, on appeal, a jail sentence was pleasing but the sentence was woefully insufficient at 2 and a half years. It must have felt, for the victims families, like he had once again been able to get away with his disgusting self serving behaviour. I just kept picturing him sitting back with that smarmy smirk on his face thinking he had pulled off the best con of all - getting away with murder.

It is often said that the most extraordinary tales tend to be the true stories; undoubtedly, it would have been a genuinely imaginative mind to have conceived this tale.

That's why I'm slightly surprised at some of the more negative reviews from people who didn't like the documentary's focus. The series does not detail the science behind the operation, how Dr Macchiarini landed the job in the first place and how he fooled so many of his peers.

Dr Macchiarini falsified reports and did not follow proper procedures while performing surgeries on humans, a majority of whom died. He completed the surgeries without testing the procedure on animals first and was aware that the procedure was unlikely to work. However, the documentary's primary focus is how he fooled an investigative journalist he dated, which is fascinating as it is intriguing.

The journalist, Benita Alexander-Noel, makes no attempts to hide her gullibility or paint herself in a particularly good light; she could have easily crawled under a rock and kept quiet, but she chose to tell her story.

The procedure was dangerous and didn't work. I am curious to know more about the science and how he ended up at his post at Sweden's prestigious Karolinska University, but that doesn't make the documentary series uninteresting for what it did cover.

While "Bad Surgeon" may leave some viewers wanting a deeper exploration of the science and Dr Macchiarini's background, as the series raises as many questions as it does answers., it undeniably captivates with its gripping narrative of deception. This extraordinary case could support multiple documentaries, each unveiling different layers, showcasing the complexity and intrigue. Despite its focused approach, the series remains mesmerizing and thought-provoking, leaving room for further exploration of this shocking tale.

If you liked Netflix's Tinder Singer, then you'll probably like this; it kept me occupied for three hours as I watched it all in one go.

Dr Death literally murdered multiple people, but Benita Alexander who is the most delusional, narcissistic, materialistic, "journalist" makes it all about her. Literally everything she says is a not so well disguised boast about how amazing she is or her life was. How can you be an apparent investigative journalist and not know this guy is full of bullsht until he claims to be an undercover CIA sniper. Didn't twig when he said the pope would perform the wedding and Obama, sarkoszy, the Clinton's and putin were all getting invited! Then bocelli and Elton John were performing for them! I'd be surprised if he'd said Elvis was coming she wouldn't have got suspicious. She literally went to interview him to do a story and then ends up getting engaged to him before the tv show even aired!! It's honestly a toss up as to which is a worse human. Not a bad documentary overall.

This documentary has about as much science in it as the not so good doctor actually practiced, the hospitals that allowed him inside to commit murder, or any doctor who entered the operating room with him and wasn't tackling him to the ground to prevent him from serially murdering people.

I first learned about this guy on a true crime program on the Investigation Discovery channel. I got more information in one hour with commercials than this 3-part series.

Once again we are hearing from the jilted journalist, who questioned anything at all only after he, finally, had to club her over the head with his lies, so fantastical, she finally woke the f* up (he claims to really be in the CIA and the doctor bit is the cover)

(Giant eyeroll).

PSA: Ladies, when that perfect man, the love of your life, starts bringing up the CIA, undercover operations, spying, and secret service bull*, he's lying to you.

(Another giant eyeroll)

We just get a few doctors for whom the lightbulb went off and we get a little bit of information about how the medical establishment went after them, rather than saying to itself, golly gee, did we ever do our homework before letting this butcher kill patients in our facilities?

Yes, people, we put our lives in the hands of these people. Yes, the rate of death goes down when hospitals close. That should tell us something.

As a person, herself, who can attest, she spent over $10,000 to save two molars that she no longer has because every single procedure (3 root canals and one implant) failed. Who had to have another breast surgery only 3 weeks after the first, because the surgery (even though the breast cancer surgeon created a special device to clear margins) didn't clear acceptable margins. Who was discharged with an infection at the incision of yet a different surgery and landed back in the ER and readmitted to the hospital to treat the infection and ended up with a hole in her belly that needed packing everyday. Whose husband was sporting a fever within hours after discharge after kidney surgery and ended up back in the hospital for a week of on IV antibiotics.

Yeah.

We're all lucky to be alive after a visit to our friendly neighborhood doctor, surgeon, or nurse.

If they are not withholding pain meds to feed their addictions, literally actively murdering us, misdiagnosing us, or because they overestimate their own skill level are - well...actively murdering us, we might actually recover from whatever ails us.

It's a gamble...

This is still worth the watch, but don't think you are going to learn anything in depth about the actual patients he slaughtered like lambs. We get some tantalizing and sad video of these people innocently and trustingly going to the slaughter, while this disheveled, unshaven, greasy-looking, bloated butcher flashes the camera with duper's delight grins and tells fantastical lies through his bad teeth.

Unfortunately, perhaps understandably because of human nature, we fall for these kinds of people time and time again.

BTW when you make an accusation/question to a liar and they respond with, but how do you know such and such did/didn't happen, instead of actually answering the question, don't doubt what you know or think you know. That's classic flipping the script backm on to you, manipulative behavior of the sociopath, the liar, the conman. Don't fall for it. When people kept telling you to trust them...

Run far, far away.

Trust your gut.

I see many who are displeased about the amount of coverage Benita gets, it's possible the story would have never been covered the way it's been without her, she should be applauded.

The hospital with its power covered up their ignorance and in doing so were putting more lives at risks, this fact alone is absolutely shocking. I guess they put profit over patient well being. Humans should not be used as experiments unless 100% aware that they are doing so and that animals haven't been tested before hand. What happened in Russia and to the girl from Turkey were absolutely nightmarish.

The surgeon should not be allowed to practice on any human again, unless maybe it's Putin who probably helped cover up the first of the many lies about the plastic airway.

All women and men and especially the desperate can easily be tricked into believing cons. Everyone seeing this should look within and check their own vulnerability. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean you are immune to a con man or woman in your future.