GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: Doctor sued over Chris Cornell’s death

domingo, 4 de noviembre de 2018

Doctor sued over Chris Cornell’s death

Doctor sued over Chris Cornell’s death

Bioedge

Doctor sued over Chris Cornell’s death

by Xavier Symons | 2 Nov 2018 |

The wife of the late American rockstar Chris Cornell is suing a Los Angeles doctor for overprescribing “mind-altering substances” to the singer.

According to a lawsuit obtained by journalists, Vikki Cornell is suing cardiologist Robert Koblin for overprescribing drugs which allegedly “impaired [Mr Cornell’s] cognition, clouded his judgement and caused him to engage in dangerous impulsive behaviors that he was unable to control, costing him his life”.

Cornell was found dead in a Detroit hotel room in the early hours of May 17, 2017. An autopsy determined the cause of death to be suicide by hanging.

Doctor Koblin is said to have prescribed over 940 doses of the powerful anti-anxiety drug Lorazepam (also known as Ativan) without having conducted a physical examination of Mr Cornell.

It is also alleged that the doctor failed to warn Cornell about the side effects of the drug, and that he allowed unsupervised, non-physician staff to write prescriptions.

Vikki Cornell has repeatedly suggested that her husband’s death was the result of over-prescribed medication, saying that he was taking extra doses of Ativan at the time of his suicide.

Recalling a conversation she had with Cornell hours before his death, she said, “I noticed he was slurring his words; he was different”.

Doctor Koblin has not commented on the allegations.

Cornell was a world famous rock performer, making his name first as the front man for the Seattle alternative rock band Soundgarden and then as a solo performer and lead singer of the band Audioslave.

Sunday, November 4, 2018

It happened so long ago that the exact details are dim in my mind, but I seem to remember that a nominee for the US Supreme Court nearly failed to score his dream job because of an alleged crime of attempted rape when he was a 17-year-old high school student. There was a huge controversy, wasn’t there? Demonstrations, twitterstorms, talking heads across the nation in a frenzy, politicians grandstanding...

Of course times were different way back then and public figures were held to a higher moral and legal standard. As the saying goes, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Nonetheless it is disturbing to read that the Democratic candidate for the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, casually told a journalist for The New Yorker that he assisted his mother to commit suicide in 2002. Assisting a suicide was a crime in California in 2002– and it still is if you are not a doctor. And at the time Newsom was not a callow teenager, but a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The odd thing about this is that there has been almost no reaction. Assisting a suicide is just as much a crime as attempted rape and in this case Newsom has admitted that he did it. You would think that at least his Republican opponent would seize upon this blithe admission as a golden opportunity to knock off Newsom's Kennedy-esque halo.

But no one seems to care. What more do you need to show that assisted suicide has been normalised in California?