You're right. They wouldn't report your death as suffocation because that'd be a symptom, not the underlying cause. Just because a cause is more fatal because of something else, that doesn't mean that something else killed them.

Using your own analogy, you're arguing that the speed of the car killed them because it made the accident more effective in killing them.

Using your logic, it could be an indefinite number of causes. If someone died of encephalitis from zoster, you could say that their brain killed them with as much equivalence as the chemotherapy or cancer. In other words, it could be anything.

If you died tomorrow, someone could say that this comment caused it because it influenced the chain of events that lead to your death. It would be just as absurd.

> Speak for yourself. I would consider them killed by the chemo/cancer.

Thank god you're not the FDA. Otherwise, we wouldn't have any type of medical procedures or medications. There'd be no difference between going to a doctor or your pastor for that brain tumor.

And what triggered the allergic reaction if not the shrimp that you ate? If I have allergy to peanuts and eat in a restaurant and the cook slips some peanut in a food that is tagged "nuts free" and I die, can the family of the diseased press charges to the restaurant?

The answer is yes. A restaurant can be liable for food allergies. Whether a restaurant has legal liability or harm caused by a food allergy depends on whether the restaurant was negligent. Because it's the ingested food that caused it.