Drugs that can lengthen life have long been a hallmark of speculative science fiction—many hope for an invention that could extend average lifespans well into the triple digits in the distant future. But the timeline of these drugs could be shorter than we think. A new clinical trial published Wednesday in Science…
The pharmacy and retail chain CVS has been hit with a civil lawsuit over its marketing of what might be the silliest kind of pseudoscience to still enjoy a modicum of popularity. It alleges that CVS has defrauded the general public by implying homeopathic remedies sold at its stores and online are every bit as…
People living with opioid addiction are increasingly using the inhalation method to get high, warns a new review published Monday in JAMA Neurology. The technique known as “chasing the dragon,” which involves heating up heroin and inhaling its fumes through a pipe, may be safer in some ways than injection, but it…
The Food and Drug Administration is doing a poor job of making sure the doctors who review drugs for possible approval are free of bias, alleges a new investigative report published this week in Science. Many of these reviewers, while having no clear financial conflicts of interest prior to their work for the FDA,…
So much for President Donald Trump’s guarantee of “massive” drops in drug prices in the near future. On Monday, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced a slew of price increases for many of its best-selling brand name drugs, including Viagra, the Financial Times first reported. Amazingly enough, it’s the second time…
Federal prosecutors have charged hundreds of people with allegedly defrauding the US government’s health care system out of a combined $2 billion. And many of the charged are doctors who are also being accused of aiding the opioid crisis by illegally prescribing more than 13 million doses of powerful, addictive…
The death toll of the US opioid crisis has been seriously lowballed, suggests a new study published Wednesday in Public Health Reports. It found that many states have failed to identify fatal drug overdoses specifically caused by opioid use over the past two decades. Since 1999, there might have been as many as 70,000…
The Department of Justice announced on Tuesday the “first nationwide undercover action to target vendors of illicit goods” on the dark web, the portion of the internet only accessible via specific software like the Tor network. According to the DOJ, the operation involved at least five federal agencies and entailed…
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of Epidiolex to treat two severe forms of epilepsy, making it the first cannabis-based drug to be legalized in the United States. It’s welcome news—but patients won’t have access to the medicine until the Drug Enforcement Agency changes the Schedule 1…
A series of heartbreaking investigative stories published Wednesday by Reveal and The Texas Tribune highlight the disturbing conditions many undocumented children have been allegedly forced to endure in privately run shelters set up to house them as they await proceedings to determine whether they can stay in the…
In recent years, psychedelic party drugs such as LSD and MDMA have been studied by scientists for their potential ability to treat mental health problems like depression and anxiety—often in microdoses much smaller than the what a person would take to trip. But while the research into these drugs is promising, there’s…
On Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health revealed its new plan to tackle the opioid crisis, which it dubbed the Helping to End Addiction Long-term, or HEAL, initiative. Among the ideas presented are research programs devoted to better understanding chronic pain, developing new non-opioid painkillers and addiction…
True cures in medicine are surprisingly rare. But for nearly five years, doctors have had one available for hepatitis C, an often chronic, life-shortening viral disease that wreaks havoc on the liver. The only problem, as a depressing study published Thursday in Open Forum Infectious Diseases highlights, is that…
It’s no secret that opioids kill more Americans annually than ever before. But a new study published Friday in JAMA Network Open highlights just how devastating the crisis has been to certain age groups. In 2016, it found, opioid overdoses were responsible for a fifth of all deaths among people in their mid-20s to…
Last night, Soros truther and former hit ABC star Roseanne Barr penned a barrage of tweets attempting to explain some recent racist, paranoid tweets that got her namesake show cancelled. Among the explanations she offered, such as it being Memorial Day, she alluded to tweeting while taking the sleep aid zolpidem,…
The ties that bind us to our ancestors might be even more influential than we knew, suggests a new study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics. It found that the grandchildren of women who took a certain hormone-mimicking drug before the 1970s were at higher risk of developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder…
On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug explicitly developed to prevent migraines. But while the drug may signal a new wave of effective treatments for this debilitating—yet often ignored and dismissed—medical condition, there are still questions as to how many migraine sufferers will…
New research out today in the New England Journal of Medicine highlights yet another impact of the opioid crisis: More people have gotten the organ donations they’ve needed in recent years because of more deaths caused by drug abuse and overdose. The research also suggests these donated organs aren’t any less safe…
Smoking has been banned in most public indoor spaces within the US for years now—and for the better—but that doesn’t necessarily mean nonsmokers are free from toxic cigarette chemicals. New research published Wednesday in Science Advances suggests that not only can the chemical residue left behind by cigarette smoking…
