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An Indiana man shot and killed a pain management physician last week, apparently as retaliation for refusing to prescribe opioids for his wife's chronic pain, police say. Todd Graham, MD, 56, was a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at South Bend Orthopaedics and a consulting physician at the University of Notre Dame. "He did what we ask our doctors to do," said St. Joseph County (Ind.) prosecutor Ken Cotter at a news conference. "Don't overprescribe opioids."

Physicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., have called themselves out for overusing opioids to manage post-op pain and say a lack of evidence-based prescribing guidelines is to blame.

According to new research, green light alleviated pain in naïve rats and in rats with spinal nerve ligation (SNL), a model of chronic neuropathic pain. Investigators determined that green light exerted its effects through the visual system and required the release of endogenous opioids in the central nervous system.

As the crisis grows, the opioid war has taken a major financial toll on rural health care providers, including the local hospital and the Mason County EMS, which receives little public funding and has been barely making ends meet. It pays the bills largely through patient insurance — which in this mostly poor, rural area is Medicaid, a program that could see massive cuts under the health care bill championed by Senate Republicans anxious to deliver on their campaign promise of repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Opioids could kill nearly half a million people across America over the next decade as the crisis of addiction and overdose accelerates. Deaths from opioids have been rising sharply for years, and drug overdoses already kill more Americans under age 50 than anything else. STAT asked leading public health experts at 10 universities to forecast the arc of the epidemic over the next decade. The consensus: It will get worse before it gets better.