More Than A Test: Children Speak Up as Adults in Healthcare Docu

Shelby Maya Smith’s More Than A Test (The Rise of the Unsilenced Movement) is a documentary on the life altering impact of a specific medical procedure on children. Featuring interviews with multiple survivors, the 24-minute film makes a case against the current practices involved in the test called VCUG or Voiding Cystourethrogram that is more than a little damning. 

All the data and testimonies point to the same conclusion: forcing children to undergo invasive procedures, many times without the presence of a guardian and without the guardian fully informed of the risks involved, affects children the same as sexual abuse. Even a cursory Wikipedia read indirectly confirms this, stating that the procedure has no standardisation. 

The results are the same: suicidal tendencies, difficulty in social and personal lives, and especially, a fraught relationship with healthcare and therefore, with one’s own body. The list is long, varied, and a summary of years long suffering. 

The film is part of the Unsilenced Movement launched by Smith, and as such is heavily data and testimony based. Riding on the coattails of those useful devices are also an abundance of stock footage and music—which does not hamper the cognitive intake of the overall message but does affect how well it is experienced by a viewer. The interviews themselves are recorded online meetings. The indirect consequence of these choices is that it speaks to what holds them together: Smith’s skill with editing. It creates a brisk pace, and so, if you cannot look past the vacuous imagery, there is at least the pleasure of having them as brief guests only. 

But these gripes aside, the interviews come together to forge an even wider idea. That, above and beyond the problems of VCUG, it is the practitioners—the doctors and nurses and technicians—who birth the trauma into being. And that is an idea that should resonate with a far bigger number of people than those who have personally experienced VCUG. Power trips, overwork, apathy, and malice in its least to most harmful variations are generously littered in healthcare-patient interactions. Trauma then becomes inevitable. And mass. 

And thus it is through this emergent notion that the film finds its crucial affective success, which may translate to more support to the movement. 

Perhaps this is the year of changes for the better despite everything. 

Watch More Than A Test (The Rise of the Unsilenced Movement) Documentary Film