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Comment by ryanwhitney | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why this is at the bottom. There's sarcasm and exaggeration, but it's a very legitimate point. [edit: ok, no longer gray and at the bottom.]

Read through the wikipedia page[0] on how it's not recognized by most medical associations.

> a specialist in investigating deaths in custody, describes excited delirium as "a boutique kind of diagnosis created, unfortunately, by many of my forensic pathology colleagues specifically for persons dying when being restrained by law enforcement."

Or a deeper Reuters investigation[1] on how closely the diagnosis and acceptance of the "condition" is tied to police and taser manufacturers, Axon specifically. Cmd+F'ing "Mash" will jump you to the parts where they're paying the medical examiner who also happens to diagnose these deaths as exited delirium.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excited_delirium#Lack_of_accep...

1: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tase...

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> Or a deeper Reuters investigation[1] on how closely the diagnosis and acceptance of the "condition" is tied to police and taser manufacturers, Axon specifically. Cmd+F'ing "Mash" will jump you to the parts where they're paying the medical examiner who also happens to diagnose these deaths as exited delirium.

I think you may have misread that part. Mash isn't and wasn't the medical examiner ever that I can find online. As best I can piece this together from that article and some Googling, Taser hired Mash as an expert witness in 8 trials for a total of ~$24,000 (included just because I believe that's in the normal range for that kind of testimony).

Then Mark Shuman, who is an Associate Medical Examiner, sent brain tissue samples to Mash's lab without knowing that Taser had previously paid her for testimony.

That's not to say the situation or diagnosis is okay, just that I think this is accusing them of something that didn't happen. There's plenty of crap they have done to criticize them for.

That Wikipedia article would be funny if the situation wasn't so tragic. It's utterly unintelligible. A condition with no proposed cause, which causes death with no specified mechanism, and a list of symptoms that matches everything from "stressed out about being arrested", to a psychotic break, to "actively overdosing on PCP". How they ever manage to convince a jury that the cardiac arrest is from some vague syndrome and not the police having basically put nipple clamps connected to mains voltage on them is beyond me.

I've missed the window to edit my original post, but you're absolutely correct. Apologies for the misinformation and thanks for digging.

No worries! The writing of the article does tend to read that way since they don't introduce her and then immediately start talking about Medical Examiners. That's how I read it at first too.

I only found out because I was trying to see if she got fired. It's one thing to find a random doctor who will say what you want, it's another thing entirely to have bought out the Medical Examiner.

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