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Peter Reeg on Most Interesting Person [Berlin Trail02e02]

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    So, come in...
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    Who am I?
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    I am Peter Reeg
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    I'm an Orthopedic Surgeon
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    I studied in Berlin and Heidelberg
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    and came to Berlin in 1970 for political reasons.
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    I was a member of a Socialist student union.
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    Medicine is politics.
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    Medicine is defined by politics.
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    The politics define how we exercise medecine.
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    You can't separate medicine and politics.
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    The efforts to cut costs in the health-system
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    is a problem for us.
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    That is politics. Of course it is.
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    The pharmaceutical industry only researches
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    areas where they expect to earn money.
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    But at that point
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    our society should finance research.
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    We can't leave that to a single company.
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    I am also interested in the history of medicine.
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    I wrote my doctorate with Professor Baader
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    I examined how the Nazis
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    developed reductionist medicine.
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    Which were techniques
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    to boost physical strength or ability with drugs.
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    Nowadays such techniques aren't used as ruthlessly
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    and as brutally as the Nazis did
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    But some elements do still exist and are used today.
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    Baader's work had a major impact on me
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    For some time I even thought about
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    Changing my specialty to history of medicine
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    I didn't do it
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    because I like the contact I have with my patients
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    and I think I'm good with people.
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    The person who has impressed me the most
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    is Professor Kentenich.
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    He is the head of a gynecological department
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    here in Berlin.
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    He does many things, sometimes too many I think
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    He is interested in politics, and extremely social
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    He thinks about ethical questions in medicine,
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    which is also very important.
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    You have many possibilities in Orthopedics.
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    You can use conservative treatments,
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    You can use surgery.
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    You can do both.
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    Yes, and I am a handicraft man - you can see.
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    And, now she will walk without pain.
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    That is the benefit.
Title:
Peter Reeg on Most Interesting Person [Berlin Trail02e02]
Description:

I first met Dr. Peter Reeg at Cafe Literature, a West Berlin haunt for intellectual coffee drinking, book browsing and lectures by international authors. It set the tone for an interview with a man who over the following 2 weeks was about to change the way I viewed the world, more than slightly.

We are born with instinct and informed by encounter. The combination of our genetic makeup and our lived experience manifest in how we behave. Some encounters are generally common-place, like eating breakfast or going to the loo. Some are less common, such as getting paid to cut people open in order manipulate their insides to relieve pain, suffering and improve quality of life.

For Dr. Peter Reeg the operating theater is familiar domain. He has performed surgery on thousands of patients, enabling them to walk, move and exist within a mobile world where they once could not. His good humour, openness and relaxed charm while sawing bone and hammering metal fixings into the cartilage of anesthetized patients in preparation for prosthetic reconfiguration - realigned normalcy in an instant.

On the one hand my diverted eyes while filming him at work, proved that inexperience of this environment and fear of the unknown play an important role in immediate response, but in conjunction something must also be said of the role of the Doctor in modern times as judge and jury of the human body.

Reeg's expressed academic interest is medical history. In particular, the ethics of contemporary medical practice informed by Nazi research, added a compelling dimension to the experience of making of this film.

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Video Language:
German
Stuart Holt added a translation

English subtitles

Incomplete

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