You can pull a scenario out of your backside that would suggest drug abuse.
Opiate addict and and respitory the failure, alcoholic and liver failure, smoker and lung disease. The coroner would no doubt suggest these as the COD in these situations. You started this thread about someone dying of pneumonia. This does not at all suggest drug abuse. You, haveing zero medical knowledge, a prejudice against drug addicts, and a “gut feeling” decided coroner was wrong. Someone suggested you practice law, which quite frankly scares me. A LOT.
MT, you can throw someone overboard… that guy won’t die of being thrown over board, the coroner will call it ‘drowning’. How and why he drowned, is of course for the Police to find out.
The guy you mentioned died of Pneumonia, how he contracted it and why he succumbed to it is a whole another matter.
Right HG?
That’s likely the heart of it right there. Pretty obvious that doctors are prescribing dangerous, addictive drugs to people who later go on to die in ways related to using the drugs. I’ve never heard of a doctor being held accountable. I would betthe system they use to avoid responsibility begins with other doctors jotting “natural causes” under “cause of death” on the guys death certificate. Not like I pay attention to issue either. I’ll bet that it’s about money though. Everything else is.
Not much I guess. That kid was on quite the cocktail.
[quote]Toxicology tests showed that Haim’s blood did have “low levels” of a list of drugs, including an antidepressant (Prozac), an antipsychotic (Olanzapine), diazepam (Valium), a muscle relaxer (Carisoprodol), a tranquilizer (meprobamate) and THC (a chemical in marijuana).
Haim also was taking a cough suppressant, antihistamine and ibuprofen.
“These medications are present in low levels and are non-contributory to death,” the autopsy report said.
California Attorney General Jerry Brown has used Haim’s death to publicize his enforcement efforts against illegal prescription drug use. At a news conference last month, Brown called Haim “the poster child” for the problem of addicts “doctor shopping” for dangerous drugs.
State investigators found that the former child actor obtained four dangerous drugs – including Vicodin, Valium, Soma and Xanax – just five days before he died, Brown said.
Brown launched an inquiry of what he said was Haim’s “doctor shopping” for drugs. Seven doctors gave him prescriptions for four controlled substances in the last 10 weeks of his life, Brown said.
Haim sometimes threatened to find other doctors to prescribe him drugs when his primary physician wouldn’t give him what he wanted, his manager said. . . .[/quote]
I like the part where it says he threatened to find other doctors when his primary physician wouldn’t get him what he wanted! Ohh! That’s quite the threat!
First, I have no idea what it means every time you do this.
Second, I’ve never heard of “respitory the failure.”
Third, I don’t need to pull scenarios out of anywhere to suggest drug abuse. It should be common knowledge that excessive use of drugs can be, and often is, fatal. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dr … ted_deaths
Fourth, you’re dead wrong to say I have zero medical knowledge. I know, just to state one example, that the heart is an organ that pumps blood through the body. :raspberry:
Fifth, I’ve got not the least bit of prejudice against addicts. I’m all for a person’s right to engage in recreational drug use if he chooses and I’ve done my fair share. I would just appreciate a little more integrity in the accounting for it afterwards if they OD. By all means, let a man smoke, snort, pop, inject all he wants (subject to well intentioned efforts from friends and family if he appears to be overdoing it), but if he takes in so many toxins (and I believe it is medically accurate to call them toxins) so that his organs fail, causing his death, lets not pussy-foot around and call it “natural causes.” Let’s be honest and say he died “from heart failure (or pneumonia or whatever) due to apparent drug overdose.” After all, the very term “overdose” suggests that there is an acceptable dose and there is a point at which a person has taken too much. Lest I be accused of “having an agenda,” my agenda concerns only accuracy with the English language, not use or abuse of drugs.
That’s likely the heart of it right there. Pretty obvious that doctors are prescribing dangerous, addictive drugs to people who later go on to die in ways related to using the drugs. I’ve never heard of a doctor being held accountable. I would betthe system they use to avoid responsibility begins with other doctors jotting “natural causes” under “cause of death” on the guys death certificate. Not like I pay attention to issue either. I’ll bet that it’s about money though. Everything else is.[/quote]
Sometimes they’''re “held accountable” but not often. For instance, there have been a number of verdicts against Bg Tobacco, and the Michael Jackson doctor is presently being prosecuted.
[quote]The executor of a deceased woman’s estate blames a pharmacist and doctor for her death, saying the doctor prescribed unsafe medication and the pharmacist gave her unsafe amounts of the medication.
Ronald L. Plumb claims defendant Dr. Tibor Kopjas and defendant physician’s assistant Natalie Redmond Menossi ordered numerous medications and refills for Lori Elizabeth Plumb, including Darvocet, Tramadol, Remeron, Protax, Azithromycin, Busiprone, Cytomel, Alprazolam, Bumetanide, Triamterene, Mirtazapine, Fluoxetine, Levothyroxine and Lexapro. . .
Because of all the medications she was taking, Lori Plumb suffered injuries to her nervous, cardiovascular, respiratory and immune systems and experienced low potassium levels, the suit states. In addition, she suffered from polypharmacy overdose, lost her normal life, suffered acute and prolonged physical and mental pain and incurred medical costs, the complaint says.
Interesting that the article doesn’t claim she died of “natural causes.” But, I don’t know if that one plaintiff wil or should prevail in her action. And, as HG pointed out, causation can be difficult to prove, in particular when the junkie procured many different types of toxins from many different sources.
Here’s more on doctors being held liable for causing their patients to die “from natural causes.”
[quote]Micali blew out her knee about seven years ago and a year later injured her shoulder snowboarding, relatives said. For help, she turned to Dr. Harriston Bass Jr. for hydrocodone-based painkillers.
In 2005, she was found dead in her home from an overdose of pills that Bass illegally sold to her, authorities said. She was 38.
On Wednesday, a Clark County District Court jury found Bass guilty of second-degree murder in Micali’s death. The jury also convicted him of 49 counts of selling a controlled substance and six counts of possession for sale of a controlled substance.
Bass could face 10 years to life in prison. . .
Authorities say Bass sold prescription medications without a license. They said Bass had a license to prescribe, but not sell and disperse, prescription medications. . .
Bass, 54, ran a mobile service called Docs 24-7. He treated patients at their homes or hotel rooms and, in some cases, prescribed and sold medications. . .
In June 2006, the Nevada Board of Pharmacy suspended Bass’ medical license for overprescribing. He also was found guilty of medical malpractice in the 1990s for failing to care for two patients who died after he performed surgery on them.[/quote] lvrj.com/news/16328921.html
[quote]20 Jennings County residents are taking a former Indianapolis doctor to court.
The parents, grandparents and wives of former OxyContin users are suing under the little-known 1998 Drug Dealer Liability Act, which holds those involved in selling illegal drugs liable for damages.
Judy Alcorn’s 18-year-old grandson died after taking OxyContin at a party. Now she has joined the suit against Randolph W. Lievertz, who pleaded guilty to overprescribing the drug and is serving a 51-month prison sentence.[/quote]
If natural causes means disease/illness (amongst others) and addiction is usually considered to be a disease/illness, then addiction = natural causes, right?
Right so how many people actually die of AIDS? Very few in fact - usually it is complications brought on by the weakened immune system that cause death. I don’t see this as any different, here was a tragic young man, who clearly was unhappy in his short life, sought refuge in drink and drugs and damaged himself beyond repair.
Whether he was using at the time is kind of irrelevant, its a bit like George Best who “if” he had stopped drinking could have repaired the damage to his liver but didn’t. Was he listed as dying of alcohol abuse - regardless of what we all know to be the “truth”?
I caught Pneumonia at age 28 and have a colleague in the office who had it recently who is even younger. The fact that he is addicted to exercise and I was abusing myself in other ways at the time are irrelevant, it is clearly not unheard of to catch it as a youngster.
Your wikipedia article in no way suggests drugs abuse “often” is fatal. It is fatal in a few cases. There are millions of chronic drug abusers in the USA alone, and that is not counting alcohol and nicotine. Nobody on this thread is arguing that drug abuse isn’t harmful.
If you actually read the article, a vast majority of those were opiate and tranquilizer overdoses
The coroner you are railing against emphatically stated he OD’d on nothing… You have been going on about a natural cause of death you assume was caused by chronic drug abuse. To the best of my knowledge, neither pneumonia nor heart failure are common results of chronic drug abuse, although heart failure does occur from time to time . It also occurs from time to time in the young for many other reasons. Pneumonia certainly occurs in the young.
Any critical thinker understands that association does not imply causation. The coroner is trained to use critical thinking, which is why you fail to grasp why he didn’t come to the conclusion you want him to.
Bob:
Doctors have been held accountable in the USA ( loss of medical license), although they are given the benefit of the doubt unless they prescribe massive doses and don’t follow a reasonable risk management protocol ( as it should be ). There are many people who need opiates to deal with pain, and doctors need to be able to prescribe them without undue fear they will be prosecuted if someone abuses them.
People who die of AIDS die xxx due to immune compromise secondary to HIV infection.
( xxx = one of set of “AIDS defining illnesses” )
A better analogy is someone with HIV who dies of a stroke. Was that a result of the damage caused by HIV or coincidence, its hard to say. A specialist may or may not be able to make that determination, I don’t know. The point is, whatever damage drug abuse may have caused this young man, nobody here has a clue whether that said “damage” resulted in his pneumonia or is coincidence. If pneumonia were secondary to damage caused by abuse, the coroner could look for signs of such damage. If he doesn’t find any, he concludes there is no causal link.
That makes sense but what some of us are wondering about I think is how hard they look for the damage that weakened the person’s health to the point where, as in this case, they die of pneumonia when otherwise they might have had the strength to recover.
Do you think this young man would have died if he hadn’t been a drug addict for so long prior to contracting pneumonia? Or do you think drug addiction was a factor and that that fact should be reflected in the statistics?
It’s nice to see MT’s examples that some physicians are being brought to task on this but I haven’t seen much in the way of actual prosecution, or more importantly, much being done to change the system. How hard would it be to store this information on a computer. That poor kid just went from one doctor to another. It shouldn’t be “possible” to do that.
What "I "think, for the record, is that most countries, but the US in particular could benefit from a more enlightened drug policy. One that “respects” a person’s “right” to use drugs up to the point that their drug taking becomes an actual threat to their own safety or the safety of others. I think that a host of problems could be solved if the state sold drugs and used the proceeds to educate and protect the population from the dangers they represent.
MT, its really really simple. What killed him? That is ALL the coroner is required to answer.
He’s NOT required to speculate on what might have caused the symptoms that led to the death. He’s ONLY required to state the cause of death.
You know this. What’s your point? Coroners should be allowed leeway? Good luck with that one.
“He did NOT die of HAPE. He died because he climbed high mountains.”
“He did NOT die of multiple injuries. He died because he drove an automobile.”
Come on, dude! You KNOW this stuff!
[quote]Addiction to prescription painkillers — which kill thousands of Americans a year — has become a largely unrecognized epidemic, experts say. In fact, prescription drugs cause most of the more than 26,000 fatal overdoses each year. . .
The number of overdose deaths from opioid painkillers — opium-like drugs that include morphine and codeine — more than tripled from 1999 to 2006, to 13,800 deaths that year. . .
The biggest and fastest-growing part of America’s drug problem is prescription drug abuse," says Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. . . .
[quote=“sandman”]MT, its really really simple. What killed him? That is ALL the coroner is required to answer.
He’s NOT required to speculate on what might have caused the symptoms that led to the death. He’s ONLY required to state the cause of death.
You know this. What’s your point? Coroners should be allowed leeway? Good luck with that one.
“He did NOT die of HAPE. He died because he climbed high mountains.”
“He did NOT die of multiple injuries. He died because he drove an automobile.”
Come on, dude! You KNOW this stuff![/quote]
Yea, I understand what you guys are saying: that apparently he’s only required to state the most immediate cause of the death, the manner in which the body failed to function sufficiently for life to continue, and he’s not required to give an opinion on why it failed to function even if that cause may be abundantly clear.
But I’m not sure that’s always the case. I would think it would be their job to determine if it were due to “natural causes” as opposed to foul play or suicide, etc., because the police and insurance companies and others will want to know such information. If an otherwise healthy person dies from cyanide poisoning, the coroner should report that so it can be determined if the cyanide was administered to him inadvertently or intentionally, if there’s a murderer out there, or if there’s a public health hazard to warn of, or if an insurance policy should or shouldn’t be paid out, etc.
Likewise, if an obvious long-time hard-core junky kicks the bucket, the coroner should note that such and such organ completely failed leading to his death, apparently caused by excessive ingestion of X substance over the years, as indicated by the scarring on his ____, the fluid in his ___, etc. The mere fact that his heart stopped beating, or he stopped breathing, or he got pneumonia and died is NOT sufficient in my mind. I believe he should, after performing a careful examination of the body and any outside information he is privy to, give his honest assessment on what actually, proximately caused his death – not just the end of the line organ failure, but what caused that organ failure.
There are different levels of causation. Excessive drug use often IS the cause of death and that’s relevant for the reasons stated above. And, in fact, I suspect that the coroner in most cases DOES agree that is relevant and does give his opinions on that in his report. I suspect the problem I take issue with has more to do with newspaper reporting than coroner reports. News headlines tersely say: Coroner states that Anna Nicole Died of Natural Causes. But in fact, the details in the report indicate to the contrary, that it wasn’t natural at all but was caused by long-time abuse.
We aren’t talking about OD. The doctor ruled that out and YOU started this whole thread because you asserted the damage due to chronic abuse caused his death and the doctor was covering patient when he said there was no overdose. We are talking about damage from chronic abuse as you stated, now you moved the goalposts to acute toxicity to fit your argument that drugs “often kill” their user. Ok goalposts moved, doctor said, blood levels weren’t high enough for OD, he died of pneumonia, end of discussion. Unless you wish to move the goalposts back?
Incidentally 13,000 out of millions is not often, it is less then 1 percent. And what percent of those 13,000 are accidental overdoses by pain patients, and not drug abusers? How often does an opiate overdose result in pneumonia or heart failure ( not secondary to death )? zero?
That makes sense but what some of us are wondering about I think is how hard they look for the >damage that weakened the person’s health to the point where, as in this case, they die of pneumonia >when otherwise they might have had the strength to recover.
You can wonder, and it is perfectly OK to wonder. It is pure speculation as to whether he would have died otherwise. Keep in mind, human intuition sees causal connections everywhere, and we are wrong most of the time. Nobody is immune to this, a lawyer should know this.
Do you think this young man would have died if he hadn’t been a drug addict for so long prior to >contracting pneumonia? Or do you think drug addiction was a factor and that that fact should be >reflected in the statistics?
I suspect he would have died anyway, given what I read in that article, but I am guessing. I don’t know how much drug addiction was a factor, if it was at all ( purely guessing: not much ), and it should Absolutely NOT be reflected in the statistics without strong evidence that he died of pneumonia secondary to organ damage caused by drug abuse.
Not his job to speculate. As you know. Again, what’s your point? All I can see is that you advocate that coroners should be allowed to include their personal opinions in their reports.
“Yes, he died of multiple blunt traumas to the head and shoulders. But it was because he smelled bad.”
Come ON!
