Dr. Drew: 'Star treatment' may have killed Tom Petty, Michael Jackson and Prince
National addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky said the “star treatment” that music legends Tom Petty, Prince and Michael Jackson received may have played a role in their deaths.
“Doctors can be attracted to giving special treatment to the stars,” said Pinsky, who has hosted numerous television shows on addiction and recovery.
Prince, for example, “was getting personal treatment from a doctor when he lived 30 minutes from premier treatment,” he said. “He should have gotten that premier treatment.”
He said problems arise when those patients become addicted, with “Michael Jackson being the poster child.”
In 2011, a jury convicted Dr. Conrad Murray of involuntary manslaughter for administering propofol, a powerful surgical anesthetic, to Jackson just hours before his death in 2009. He was sentenced to up to four years in prison and served two years.
(Murray, who was earning up to $3 million a year as Jackson’s personal physician, has since released a memoir, “This is It,” praising his treatment of the music legend and other patients, including Mother Teresa. “I loved the way I dedicated my services to her, it was totally selfless because when I agreed to serve her, I literally had no idea then that she was widely known,” he wrote.)
The coroner for Los Angeles County concluded that Jackson died from a mixture of propofol and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam, midazolam and diazepam.
The autopsy showed that Prince died in 2016 of a fentanyl overdose. Other drugs, including the opioid oxycodone, were found at his home.
Petty’s recently released autopsy report revealed that the following drugs were found in his system: fentanyl, acetyl fentanyl, despropionyl fentanyl and oxycodone (all opioids); temazepam and alprazolam (both benzodiazepines); and citalopram (an antidepressant).
The report concluded Petty died from a “multisystem organ failure due to resuscitated cardiopulmonary arrest due to mixed drug toxicity.”
Petty’s family said he was prescribed these medicines. They said he suffered from a fractured hip and was in immense pain.
But acetyl fentanyl has not been approved for medical use in the U.S.
Pinsky said the combination of benzodiazepines (which includes Xanax) and opioids (which includes fentanyl and oxycodone) “is lethal. This is the hidden epidemic.”
Fentanyl is also a huge red flag, he said. “Fentanyl was designed for cancer patients who are going to die.”
But physicians for Petty and Prince somehow prescribed them.
Some experts have called fentanyl “heroin on steroids,” a drug so powerful and potentially deadly that the equivalent of two grains of sand of the opioid can cause an overdose.
More than 20,000 Americans die each year from it and related drugs.
Because fentanyl is so cheap to make, drug cartels are now using the drug to create fake pills or mix it with heroin, selling them on the streets or by way of the dark web.
Pinsky said another problem for Petty was that he was recovering from heroin addiction.
Because heroin is a part of the opioid family, he said, giving opioids to a recovering addict “is the same thing.”
When people are recovering from heroin or other opioid addiction, they could be treated for a brief time with opioids for acute pain, say after surgery, but they must be monitored closely, he said. “After that, everything should go right back to where it was before.”
Pinsky shakes his head when he hears some doctors claim that trauma, rather than drugs, causes addiction.
“Certainly, emotional trauma can cause people to gravitate toward drugs,” he said.
The problem is these doctors “don’t understand addiction. They’re killing addicts all the time,” he said.
Some blame drug companies for the opioid epidemic, “but no drug company was encouraging Tom Petty,” he said. “These are well-meaning doctors who don’t understand addiction.”
Across the U.S., “we need to expose doctors more to what addiction is,” he said. “Clearly that goes for those who treat addicts. Unfortunately, if you just focus on the pain and not the setting, it goes bad for the patient.”
Even, he said, if your patient happens to be a rock star.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen