For more than a decade, members of a little-known group called the Pain Care Forum have blanketed Washington with messages touting prescription painkillers‘ vital role in the lives of millions of Americans, creating an echo chamber that has quietly derailed …
The makers of prescription painkillers have adopted a 50-state strategy that includes hundreds of lobbyists and millions in campaign contributions to help kill or weaken measures aimed at stemming the tide of prescription opioids, the drugs at the heart of …
At first, the woman tried to hide her painkiller problem. She told the doctor that she still had pain from her past pregnancy, and that she just wanted a refill on her pain medication. After a few questions, though, she …
Accidental overdoses aren’t the only deadly risk from using powerful prescription painkillers – the drugs may also contribute to heart-related deaths and other fatalities, new research suggests. Among more than 45,000 patients in the study, those using opioid painkillers had …
Critics of how prescription painkillers are administered in the U.S. are calling on health officials to phase out hospital procedures and questionnaires used to manage pain. They say the current system inadvertently encourages the overprescribing of addictive drugs like Vicodin …
Short-acting opioid painkillers will carry strong new warnings under U.S. Food and Drug Administration requirements announced on Tuesday that will bring information about addiction and abuse in line with that on long-acting pills. The FDA’s action comes a week after …
A crackdown on Florida’s “pill mills” – clinics dispensing large quantities of prescription painkillers often for cash-only and without proper medical examinations – appears to have dramatically reduced the number of overdose deaths in the state from these drugs and …
Opioid painkiller addiction and accidental overdoses have become far too common across the United States. To try to identify who is most at risk, Mayo Clinic researchers studied how many patients prescribed an opioid painkiller for the first time progressed …
Many primary care physicians – the top prescribers of prescription pain pills in the United States – don’t understand basic facts about how people may abuse the drugs or how addictive different formulations of the medications can be, new Johns …
A doctor with offices in Kentucky and southern Indiana has been charged with prescribing pain medications that resulted in the deaths of five patients. The U.S. attorney’s office in Louisville said 47-year-old Jaime Guerrero was charged Wednesday in a 32-count …