Solving America’s painkiller paradox

This year, researchers uncovered a simple method for getting doctors to reduce profligate prescriptions of drugs like OxyContin and Percocet that have contributed to America’s opioid epidemic: informing doctors that one of their patients had died. In their study, which was published in Science in August, researchers sent a letter, through the...

For the elderly, when is opioid prescription worth the risk?

Jordyn Hermani of the Indianapolis Star reports that in Indiana, less than 1 percent of Hoosiers age 65 and older — 115 of the 18,312 diagnosed opiate use disorder patients in 2017 — suffer from opiate use disorder. Addiction is defined by continuously taking an opioid for more than three months. While that number is smaller than among oth...