This is a thriller in which medicine plays an important part, but it’s not of the familiar “medical thriller” genre, so the expected images of creepy doctors and close-ups of needles were immediately ruled out. The red cross, an emblem of medical rescue, is treated like a battered wound to convey the central contradiction of the story—that a good-Samaritan drug trade exists to help chronic-pain-suffering patients obtain illegal drugs the medical establishment refuses to provide for them.