Thursday, February 7, 2008
The medical examiner's report is out on the young actor who recently died (I'm not using the name because I don't want search hits), and they're calling it an accidental overdose. That means "no blame assigned".
If anyone should take the responsibility, it should be the doctor who prescribed all those narcotics he was taking.
In my opinion, if you're going to hand someone that many medications that whack the brain and depress the systems, you don't put the patient in charge of dosing! You also prescribe a nurse, who can count. The patient, in despiration, will take one, it doesn't work immediately, he takes another, gets foggy in the head, forgets how long it's been, takes something else, gets foggier, and next thing you know he's counting pills like Ex#2 used to count booze: 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1 ....
And, oxycontin? WTH?! For the pain of coughing with pneumonia? Oh, come on! Oxy-anything is overkill. That's something you use for like cancer pain, or surgery involving nerves and other heavy-duty stuff. With everything else he was taking, the stuff they give for arthritis should have been more than sufficient for the cough.
Whoever prescribed those meds without foreseeing what was likely to happen is responsible for what did happen. In my opinion.
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2 comments:
All the doctor can believe is patient's self-reporting. If I'm new to Dr. A and don't disclose that I'm on Drugs 1, 2, and 3, it's all the same to me when he prescribes Drugs 3 (again), 4, and 5. If I don't have health insurance or decide to pay for the second set on my own at another pharmacy, whether through scheming or simple forgetfulness, it's no one's fault but my own that I crash.
When I've been in a situation where I'm taking drugs that fuzz up my memory (back in the day, it was codeine), I kept the pill bottle on top of a little notebook and wrote down when and what I took.
So when they get done with the "Are you smarter than a 5th grader show?", are they going to have a show called "Are you smarter than an actor?"
I'm not 100% certain, but I'm under the impression that all the prescriptions came from one doctor.
With Jay, who was taking some powerful stuff, there were several occasions where even when a doctor had the complete list of his meds (he had several specialists) things would be prescribed that had serious interaction problems. I found that I had to do the research myself.
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