Bruce Lee fans will always argue how and why Bruce Lee really died. Here is my 'SUMMARY'of what basically happened during his final months on this planet.
1. He was big time strung out
2. Cortisone
3. He was a very sensitive man
4. He didnt handle the perceived pressures of fame well
5. He may very well have had an eating disorder
6. His weight loss
7. His lack of body fat
8. He drank Saki while living in Hong Kong
9. He got drunk very easily
10. He was trying to live like Mr Hollywood
11. Raymond Chow was stealing from him
12. He had stopped training
13. He did eat Hash Brownies (although this in itself would not kill him)
14. It's fair to say that it wasn't going well between Bruce and Linda Lee
15. No one wanted to be caught with the most famous person in Hong Kong dead in their flat. Hong Kong Chinese are infamous for refusing to have involvement with anything that could cause them to lose face
16. Raymond Chow was helping promote a very unhealthy life for Bruce Lee (Betty Ting Pei). It is that way of living that directly caused Bruce Lee's death see no. 1. Raymond Chow did not know that this would happen; his role was indirect. The same could be said of many people around Bruce Lee
17. All combined = Multifactorial cause of death
Most of these are from Davis Miller.
My own personal view: Bruce had clear visions of what he was capable of doing but in essence tried to take himself beyond the possibilities of what humans can actually do and that ultimately caused his body and mind to shut down.
Findings in the medical community a number of yrs ago suggest that Bruce Lee may have died from sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), which was only recognized in 1995. Bruce collapsed on May 10th 1973 (a couple months before he died on July 20th) with the same problem. He was close to death but was saved in time. He was given medication to treat an epileptic disorder. Interesting when you consider SUDEP was recognized 22 years later as a valid epileptic condition brought on by stress and lack of sleep. Out of all the theories, this makes the most sense to me. What may have been a mystery to the medical community in 1973 may be common knowledge 20 years or so later. I know there were people like Bob Wall and Robert Clouse that said Lee was under allot of stress and lacked sleep during the making of Enter the Dragon, Lee would call Clouse all hours of the night with ideas for the movie and was never really able to unwind. Bruce Lee died because of too much stress and lack of sleep that caused his brain to swell and caused edema. These incidents in Japan, where many business man worked too much and died over stressed and collapsed (Karôshi) is the same; The first case of karôshi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old male worker in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company. It was not until the later part of the 1980s, during the Bubble Economy, however, when several high-ranking business executives who were still in their prime years suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, that the media began picking up on what appeared to be a new phenomenon. This new phenomenon was quickly labeled karôshi and was immediately seen as a new and serious menace for people in the work force. In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on karôshi.
Take care.
