Awakening by Penny Marshall

Awakening is an American movie in the 90s that based on a neurologist, Oliver Sack’s real life experience. This video depicted how Dr. Malcolm Sayer tries to cure his encephalitis epidemic patients who demonstrated catatonic symptom by administering drugs and stimulus. In the process of searching for the best solution to cure his patients, Dr. Sayer comes across L-Dopa, a drug that was known to treat Parkinson disease. He notices the similarity of symptom in patient with Parkinson disease and his catatonic patient and has decided to treat his patient with L-Dopa.

I was astonished by Dr. Sayer’s decision to treat his patient with a drug that is not meant for them. Even though he did some reading and attended a lecture on L-Dopa, that doesn’t give him the right to simply administered the drug to his patient simply because he THINK it work. Also, I was having a hard time to accept the fact that Dr. Sayer and his pharmacist simply manipulates the amount of drugs to be administered to Leonard. I was completely stunned when Dr. Sayer silently doubled the amount of drug of Leonard without the assistant of his colleague and administered it to Leonard. Dr. Sayer was gambling with Leonard life by assuming excessive amount of drugs would help Leonard when his colleague suggested reducing the amount of drug to be administered. Even though Leonard does turn better and ‘woke up’. I was disappointed by the fact that Dr. Sayer doesn’t bother to observe Leonard for a period before administering L-dopa to the other patients. He could have prevented the awakening of other patients and safe them from the frustration that they have to deal in accepting who they are now and the deterioration of their health when the drug effect fade off. This inspired me to think about several ethical issues that arise from this movie. I am glad that we (psychology student, medicine study and etc.) were taught to place ethic and the welfare of our clients at the first place as this can guarantee the quality of the treatment provided. At the same time, I manage to better appreciate the rules and laws that we were forced to obey because that seem to be the only thing that can govern the welfare or the consumer from harms. Like it or not but this is the fact that history appears to show.