When I did an online search for “what is kratom?” this past week, thousands of results popped up. That wasn’t the case in 2018, when I certified a young man’s cause of death as “acute mitragynine intoxication.” At the time the opioid epidemic was near its peak, so this was an unexpected toxicological finding. I’d…
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Freezing to Death
On February 12, Brianna Mohr, a healthy and athletic 21-year-old hiker was found on an Adirondack mountain after freezing to death. Officials have released few details about the tragedy other than confirmation of the cause of death — hypothermia — after an autopsy by a forensic pathologist. Here’s a comment someone left online about this…
AI in Medicolegal Death Investigation
Are coroners and medical examiners already using artificial intelligence (AI) in their medicolegal death investigations? For what purposes? How will AI affect the work of coroners? It’s time to ask these questions. In 2022, a scientific paper claimed that “the traditional way of doing an autopsy and framing an opinion has a lot of limitations…