Using data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Canadian researchers focusing on adult deaths for those aged 24 to 35 found that in 2016, the last year studied, 20 percent of all fatalities in this age group were opioid related. In 2001, the figure was just 4 percent.

There's a shortage of physicians needed to intervene in acute strokes. Cardiologists have the skills, but not the experience or judgment. Should they fill the gap? Will more patients be helped or harmed?

Keith Humphreys, a psychologist, writes about opioids for The Washington Post. But he has an unusual take on the matter. Does Humphreys know what he's talking about? Let's see. 

Reductionism is the basis for most science. Since so many factors can be involved, isolating them in a lab-bench experiment can yield valuable insights. For epidemiological studies, it doesn’t work as well.

Can the FDA's tactics – to impact the current opioid problem – also predict its successor? The goal is to head off escalation before problems are crises, and the move is a departure from the status-quo, reactive nature of prior policies.

This week, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, an NFL offensive lineman, graduated from McGill University’s medical school while an active player for the Kansas City Chiefs. In football's modern era, if not the NFL's entire history, his fascinating accomplishment – the first active player to hold a medical degree – appears to be unprecedented.

With the proposed consumer privacy initiative in California a reaction to internet data abuse, it's time, long overdue, to discuss the murky territory once-presumed-protected health information has entered.

French lawmakers gave President Emmanuel Macron an exit from his bizarre political promise last year about banning the safe, herbicide glyphosate. And Europeans, finally, have caught on to the junk science at Ramazzini Institute.

The ubiquitous, on-screen advertising about prescription drugs is highly structured by the FDA. That helps explain why the voice-over's claims and cautions are delivered so quickly at the end of the commercial. 

In our postmodern society – where truth is relative, "fake news" is prevalent, and scientific facts are just an opinion – it shouldn't come as a surprise that modern medicine is facing a backlash.