Heath Ledger and a Doctor's Responsibility

What I wrote today has to do with my frustration at the death of actor Heath Ledger who died of an accidental overdose of painkillers, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medication and other prescription drugs. He also had prescriptions to all of these medications. A cigarette company or a street corner drug dealer can be liable for someone who dies because of their actions. Even a bar can be liable if a person drinks too much at the bar and then dies later on, it is the bars fault for not cutting the person off. How can the doctors treating Mr. Ledger not have to face what they did to him?

I heard someone talking yesterday on how they had stomach aches and went to their doctor who gave them something to help with the stomach pain. When she got her medication she saw how the pharmacy’s now put papers with info on your prescriptions to explain what it is. The first thing she read was how her medication could cause stomach cramps. She thought isn’t that what I am taking the medicine for in the first place.
This makes about as much sense to me as if you went to an emergency room because you accidently cut your finger off and the doctor tells you he has to cut off a couple more before doing anything else. We look at drugs on how many percent of people it helps, but just shrug off the ones who had bad effects from the drug. If I take lomitil for my diarrhea it might help but always makes me feel like I am going to throw up. I can then get something for the nausea but am allergic to a lot of the medications and have bad reactions. I would then get Benadryl to help with the reactions and then become drowsy and want to sleep afterwards. I might then want to pump myself with caffeine and sugar to stay awake, which could cause the stomach aches again which starts the process all over. How is this medicine or even what we might think as making any sense? What if in the very fist place we looked at the stomach ache this person had and looked more at treating the cause of the stomach ache. Maybe it is food, stress, or disease that can all be treated at the root of the problem and not with symptom treatment medicine.