Pain brings more people into contact with medical professionals than any other problem. The most common medical treatment for pain—both acute and chronic—is opioid medications (so-called “painkillers” ...

Look back through a decade of headlines, and you’ll understand why the FDA’s new drug advisory panel held its collective nose last week when it voted to recommend Purdue Pharma’s application for a new ...

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The drugmaker Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin two decades ago with a bold marketing claim: One dose relieves pain for 12 hours, more than twice as long as generic medications. Patients would no ...

A synthetic drug designed as a pain medication and considered highly addictive. Abusers take it for its opiate-like effects. Also called Oxy, OC's, O's, hillbilly heroin. Who abuses it: Abusers often ...

When Sister Wives star Christine Brown used oxycodone, a well-known pain medication, she quickly found herself addicted to this Schedule II controlled substance. Following her knee surgery, this ...

WASHINGTON -- Dr. Raeford Brown was uniquely positioned to help the U.S. government answer a critical question: Is a new version of the painkiller OxyContin helping fight the national opioid epidemic?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The makers of the potent painkiller OxyContin have pulled out of a federal meeting to review the company’s harder-to-abuse version of the much-debated drug. An executive for Purdue ...

But OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and ...