By Robert Yaniz Jr.

Filmmaker Jeff Witzeman’s latest is a daring, eye-opening look into the U.S. health care system.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Your child is diagnosed with cancer, and seemingly your only recourse is to submit your son or daughter for aggressive treatment, including years of prescribed chemotherapy. For thousands of children and their parents, this is the harsh reality and one that is largely considered within the health care community to be the only way to achieve remission. As Flipping the Script: When Parents Fight Back reveals, even parents that prefer a more holistic approach to treating their children’s disease have no apparent say in the matter.

With his first film Cancer Can Be Killed, Jeff Witzeman explored how his wife was able to cure her own cancer within 30 days overseas, while the disease remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States. How many of these lives might have been spared if the medical community embraced alternative treatment options? To further develop his original thesis, Witzeman travels around to interview parents who have defied doctors’ orders — and conventional health care wisdom — and decided not to submit their children to extended chemotherapy.

You see, in the United States, it’s standard practice for children with cancer to undergo years of therapy, even after they no longer exhibit signs of the disease in their bodies. The thinking here ostensibly is to ensure that any lingering cancer cells that may be present are eradicated, minimizing the chances of relapse. However, the parents in Witzeman’s new film have found more natural, less invasive ways to heal their children and are therefore forced to fight a system that would accuse them of parental neglect in order to do so.

Viewers expecting Flipping the Script to take an objective viewpoint on both sides of this issue might be disappointed, as the film has a clear position on the plight of the parents it features. But that’s precisely why its message is so powerful. These are parents who have shunned Western medicine in favor of something they believe is far more effective, ultimately devoting their lives to protecting their children from the ravages of a deadly disease by any means necessary.

Witzeman’s film delves deep into the lives of the families affected — including a neat framing device centering on a specific pair of families — but also includes a nice balance of commentary from experts in the medical field itself.  Along the way, Flipping the Script sheds light on the system of corruption, emotional manipulation and shameless capitalism perpetuating the belief that chemotherapy (and, indeed, such a volume of it) is the sole course of action to save these children’s lives.

Perhaps Flipping the Script lacks the production value of more polished documentaries, and the playfulness of the brief animated segments does feel a bit jarring for such a serious subject. But none of that deters from Witzeman’s mission to educate viewers about the fact that cancer treatment doesn’t have to exclusively mean chemotherapy, especially when the patients are so young. As the film itself points out, this is a topic that virtually no one is talking about. Hopefully, with films like Flipping the Script out in the world, that conversation will finally begin happening soon rather than later.

RATING: 4/5

Flipping the Script: When Parents Fight Back is directed by Jeff Witzeman and is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.