If you’ve recently tried to find out what happened to someone from your past (and who hasn’t?), an online search may be futile. Obituaries seem to be disappearing. Or are they? Are obituaries less common now? Changes in population, society, and technology in the past 25 years make it impossible to determine if families are…
Blog
Kratom: Panacea or Peril?
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…
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…