Death by doctoring - when will the madness stop?

 This is not an overdose

The night before Isaac Reis died, the 22-year-old knew something wasn’t right.

Isaac was so concerned about all the prescription medication he was taking, he asked to stay at his parent’s house.

The 22-year-old had recently moved out of home, but he phoned his father Paul Reis late that night asking to be picked up.

“When I picked him up, he was slightly sedated. He’d taken his night-time medication,” Mr Reis told the ABC.

Isaac told his father he wanted to be readmitted to a psychiatric hospital to have all of his medications reviewed.

“He was concerned. And I was concerned at the time too, because the further we got to home he became a lot more sedated.”

When they arrived home, Isaac was groggy and unsteady on his feet. He fell asleep in a chair and Mr Reis helped his son into bed at around midnight.

“I just didn’t know the gravity of the situation and I didn’t know all of these medications that had been prescribed to Isaac.”

Isaac had taken a toxic combination of 10 different drugs, as prescribed by his doctors, and was entering what a forensic physician has described as a “terminal slide”.

The next morning, Mr Reis found his son unconscious. Paramedics worked on Isaac for an hour but could not revive him.

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By Lorna Knowles / Senior Journalist for the ABC Investigations Unit in Sydney

Lorna has won two Walkley Awards for her work in print and television.
Her 25-year career began as a reporter for News Ltd, before she moved to Channel 7.
She joined the ABC in 2006, where she has worked on programs including Four Corners and 7.30. Lorna has a law degree and specialises in legal and social affairs reporting.

Contact Lorna Knowles

By ABC Investigations
By Jackie Dent
By John Stewart / Professor of Evolutionary Palaeoecology, Bournemouth University

I am an evolutionary palaeoecologist with broad research interests encompassing the use of faunas in reconstructing Pleistocene and Holocene ecologies (and increasingly from the Neogene), understanding the nature, timing and location of ice age refugia for species, and building and testing molecular biogeographical hypotheses on how species respond to environmental change (in collaboration with ancient DNA practitioners). I am also interested in the relationship between species and subspecies level evolution and extinction during the Quaternary; and more recently the use of Quaternary data in conservation biology.

(Source: abc.net.au; May 5, 2021; https://tinyurl.com/yhk3gedp)
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