Yes this doc was negligent. Yes he is guilty of VERY poor judgement, poor skill and he was in over his head. Yes he exhibited questionable ethics at best and yes he should lose his license to practice medicine for the rest of his life, but I am personally very afraid of him being prosecuted criminally for practicing medicine in any way, regardless of the setting.

I would expect to see the AMA issuing a position on the topic in general but after their limp stance on “healthcare reform” I have come to see the AMA for what it is…but that’s another topic.

The author assumes that the timeline Murray provided to the LAPD is the truth. We must remember that we are talking about information coming from a doctor who did not call paramedics until 90 minutes after his patient died and then withheld information from those paramedics. This physician also withheld information from the emergency room healthcare professionals and left the hospital after directions from the LAPD to remain there for questioning. The in his interview 2 days later he did not tell the LAPD about the 3 telephone calls, lasting a total of 47 minutes, he made before he called the paramedics to the house.

If the author then chooses to selectively believe that the information above is truthful, then I suppose the resulting article has some merit. But after “considering the source,” I am hesitant to agree that Jackson was wide awake between all of these injections of sedatives, meaning that he had such a resistance to them that an addiction can be assumed.

It seems to me that the sedatives were Dr. Murray’s idea, not Jackson’s. And taking into consideration the fact that Jackson had passed a recent physical and a blood test given by a nurse practioner showed no drugs in his system, I would be more apt to believe that, just as the coroner states on the death certificate, it was the propofol that killed Jackson – the propofol administered by an unlicensed physician outside of a hospital context.

making assessments of MJ’s psychiatric diagnosis based on his profession plus a distant observation without a formal evaluation by a skilled psychiatrist is dangerous and unfair to him or any public or private person.

I’ve tried to collect allnotable tributes paid to Michael Jackson by peers:

http://www.tributespaid.com/category/m/michael-jackson

Gross negligence is another matter. And yes it is light years away. I’m a physician too, I use propofol in my field. You don’t use propofol under the conditions like Jackson’s.

No, I wouldn’t criminally prosecute, I’d suspend a license pending investigation. But then again, I’m not on any medical board, so that opinion and a few bucks gets you a latte.

I agree, you don’t criminally prosecute a doctor for bad judgement, or even stupidity. You take away their license to practice.

The local drug dealer can do that, and the local drug dealer might have done a better job of managing the dose. Certainly he couldn’t have done a worse job.