Heith Ledger and drugs......
 

OK so my wife has a question she wants to ask. she hears enough about this board every day so she is wanting to stick her toe in the water.

M.J. ..........
...is anyone as miffed as i am that all the hubbub about this poor soul who od'd on six prescription drugs and the media is only blaming him? what about the doctors who prescribe multiple drugs? and often it's more than six. i have too many horror stories from my mother to friends to my own self about over prescribing. i have even told doctors that i don't want their drugs and they still insist and yet the patients are blamed. for myself, i now refuse to take any prescription drug, but, am i the only one who feels the doctors and big pharm are also responsible?

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/news/bal-to.hs.prescription07feb07,0,5243276.story

In this article the doctor talks about how a person would never get prescribed all these meds at the same time. Even if he ways, for me common sense would prevail and I would know not to take "two prescription painkillers (oxycodone and hydrocodone); two prescribed anti-anxiety drugs (diazepam and alprazolam); and two sleep aids" at the SAME TIME.

"Poor soul" my ass - he was using these drugs to get high and he f*cked himself by taking too much. Just another junkie turned into worm food.

(A) It's Heath Ledger.

(B) It's a shame when someone that young passes. Thom, if an (adrenalin) junky "f*cked himself" backcountry skiing or desert racing would you feel the same way?

-Chris

You really see no distinction between getting killed while skiing or racing, and killing yourself while trying to get high on drugs?

it's called "doctor shopping." See Limbaugh, Rush for more details.

Odds are he had multiple doctors prescribing the stuff and they did not know about the other docs. Happens all the time. It is one reason that some people want centralized medical records. It doesn't just happen with "fun" drugs...you can get toxic interactions from damn near anything.

If the patient doesn't disclose to the doctor what meds he/she is on, how can you hold the doc responsible?

I've mixed and matched in my past. Maybe I was lucky or just had a better understanding of what was going on. Mistakes happen though...I know that one too. My guess is either he doctor shopped or just bought them all black market. Then took too many. Stuff happens. There but for the grace of god go i...

Yeah...Heath. Sorry, Duh.

Good luck with that.

In 1770 the average life expectancy for women in the American colonies was 36 years. In 1900 it was 50 years.

Left to it's own devices, nature is cruel and merciless.

Its really easy, just get kidney stones and you get a big ole jug of vicodin any time you want..

But I would rather not have the stones!!

I have 2 docs--I could easily get 5 presc. between the two of them. I choose not to, hence me typing thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Heath Ledger, Keith Richards, whatever...

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY........ Damn you doctors for making Heath seek out and take 10 different perscriptions!

The combination of drugs shown on his tox screen, would not normally be scripted by just one MD. Many people that have this much compounding of narcotics along with OTC items, is due to them, "Doctor Shopping" or "Drug Shopping" in order to be able to get the quantity and the various types of drugs. HYDROCODONE(Lortab, Lorcet, Vicoden), OXYCODONE(Percocet, Endocet, Roxicet, Tylox), Valium, Xanax, Restoril, and over the counter Unisom.
There were 3 scripts from outside the U.S. so it would appear that more than one MD had written for the meds. It appears the he was "shopping" and he made the same move that many have before. The combination of the drugs, will have a poor result, due to the adverse effects on the central nervous system, then resulting in respiratory failure. You go to sleep and never wake up.

I think you underestimate the will and inventiveness of those who will choose to abuse prescription drugs. If a patient comes into my office and tells me they take 3 medications, how am I to know if they are lying and actually take 6? Now, if you want to have a discussion on why a physician would give an otherwise healthy young man prescription pain meds that's another issue. As noted above, he was on multiple redundant meds which is a pretty good indicator that he got those meds from multiple different doctors who likely didn't know that he was stashing these away.

I'm not defending the docs who prescribed prescription pain killers and anxiolytics to a 30 year old, but to lay the blame at the feet of the medical profession and treat Ledger as some sort of innocent victim just isn't realistic.

If the reports of prescriptions from outside the US are true, that's an entirely different ball of wax. The medical market works VERY differently in other countries. Heck, in Mexico you can pretty much walk up to any pharmacy and just buy what you want, often without ANY prescription. Deniro talks you know...

So true Rick!

Wow. Hope you live well. No RX drugs????

How in the world are Docs and big pharm responsible for Ledger doing this to himself?????

Well, just to add my two cents...

I had a friend back in the day that used to do recreational drugs and sometimes would over-medicate.

You see it can happen like this, you pop a few pills to get a buzz... time passes... pop a few more... problem being as you get more buzzed you forget how many or what you have been taking.

And before you folks go getting all judgmental remember the same thing happens to grandmas as often as to twenty somethings looking for a buzz.

Targa tell your wife to get real. She feels bad because he is a movie star

I'm from the club/bar business. There is no reason to have that many drugs in your system unless your a user.

Of course it was an accident, he didnt mean to kill himself, he only wanted to get high.

I see this almost EVERYDAY (not the death but the drug use).

Not sure why Heath would need a painkiller as strong as the OXY (aka hillbilly herion). Maybe he had chronic back pain? His posession and combining it with the vicodin and other drugs leads me to think while they may have been prescription drugs, they were not prescribed to him.

I wonder how many different doctors prescribed those medications. I wonder how many different pharmacies are listed on those precription labels. I wonder how truthful he was regarding his health and medication history when he went to said physicians and obtained the prescriptions.

Obviously, I don't have the answers to the above questions. But I don't think the laying of the blame is as simple as you make it sound, targa.

I don't even know how big pharm has any blame in this situation, other than perhaps paying for advertising so that patients come in and ask for medications by name, with little understanding of where that particular med lies in the hierarchy of indications and medical armamentarium.

Sad that such a young guy (and a dad) with so much promise is no longer around.