stukje over de dood van ledger (joker in batman) zei:Heath Ledger Post-Mortem: When Mixing Medicine Kills
Posted by Jacob Goldstein
A key lesson from Heath Ledger’s death: It’s not the dose so much as the mix.
The medical examiner in New York said Ledger had all of the following drugs in his system when he died: The painkillers oxycodone (in its long-acting form, OxyContin) and hydrocodone (Vicodin); the anti-anxiety and anti-insomnia drugs diazepam (Valium), temazepam (Restoril), and alprazolam (Xanax); and doxylamine (Unisom), an antihistamine used as a sleep aid.
While painkillers can be deadly at high doses, many drugs can’t do too much damage in isolation. But mixing them can cause trouble. In 2005, nearly 600,000 people showed up at the ER because of side effects from nonmedical use of prescription drugs — and most of those people had taken more than one drug, the WSJ reports.
Even taking medicine in the amounts prescribed by doctors for legitimate medical purposes can sometimes be problematic, especially if a patient is getting different prescriptions from multiple doctors who aren’t aware of all the drugs the patient is taking. Taking many drugs at once can slow their breakdown in the liver, raising the level of drug still in the body.
“For drugs in general, any combination you might take, there is always the potential for an interaction that might cause the drugs to work differently than if they were taken alone,” Cynthia Kuhn, professor of pharmacology at Duke, told the WSJ.
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