A recent Los Angeles premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films, Tumor: It’s in the System joins a considerable slate of contemporary documentaries — inclusive of Peter Nicks’ raw, verité-style The Waiting Room — offering up a damning assessment of different elements of the American health care system. Here it’s a look at how potential alternative treatments (like divisive Gerson therapy) and even cures for cancer have been suppressed since the early 1900s — the implication being that some combination of the bureaucratic regulatory system and the rapacious self-interest of capitalism have combined to incentivize managed treatment of symptoms over the long-term health of the population.

Such material has the capacity to tip over into “black helicopter” territory fairly quickly, but co-directors Valerie McCaffrey and Cindy Pruitt, despite a fevered sense of advocacy that sometimes gets the better of their editorial plotting, do a generally good job of interweaving testimonials from an array of open-minded physicians and unusual survivors whose stories belie the myth that chemotherapy is the only — or indeed, even the best — way to combat cancer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Become a Revolution Productions, unrated, 76 minutes)