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Patients refuse care based on health-care providers’ ethnicity and religion so often that this phenomenon has been dubbed “medicine’s open secret.” A new poll shows that a majority of health-care professionals say they have faced prejudice from patients. In 2013, a nurse in Flint, Mich., sued a pediatric intensive care unit after it granted a request from a father to enter “no African American nurses” on his infant’s care plan. Damon Tweedy, an African American psychiatrist, describes similar experiences in bruising detail throughout his memoir, “Black Man in a White Coat.” And when Esther Choo, an Asian American emergency department physician, tweeted last month that white nationalists refused her care, she set off a Twitter storm of health-care providers responding with similar stories. (Dorothy R. Novick, 10/19)

Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under age 50, killing roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year. An increase in fatalities is largely fueled by opioids, including fentanyl, a powerful synthetic substance considered up to 50 times more potent than heroin. Although Iowa has not been hit as hard as some other states by the opioid epidemic, we have not been spared. (10/19)

Many addicted people try to bind their future selves to a commitment to stop using drugs. Some move across the country to a place where they don’t know any dealers or fellow users. Others throw away all their drugs and injection equipment. ... Such tactics are often thwarted by the future self of the addicted person who adopted them. Like other drugs to which people become addicted, opioids cause enduring adaptations in the brain that weaken self-control and increase the urge to use these drugs. In addition, many people with drug addictions inhabit social networks that provide repeated stimuli and opportunities to use drugs. (Keith Humphreys, 10/19)

In early September, a 17-year-old girl from Central America was apprehended trying cross the border between the United States and Mexico. After being taken to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in South Texas to await immigration proceedings, she learned she was pregnant. The girl, referred to as Jane Doe in court filings, was adamant that she wanted an abortion. ... For almost a month, some of these Trump appointees have been waging a crusade to force the young woman, whose future in this country is extremely uncertain, to carry her pregnancy to term. Their standoff shows us the real-world consequences of this administration’s radical disregard for women’s autonomy. (Michelle Goldberg, 10/20)

It is unconscionable that the federal government would so flagrantly undermine the rights of a person in its custody. The girl, known in court papers simply as Jane Doe, may not be here legally, but, while she is here, she has a constitutional right — like every other pregnant girl or woman in the United States — to a legal abortion. Even U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who ruled Wednesday that Doe could get the abortion, shook her head in disbelief when a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer at the hearing would not concede that Doe has constitutional rights. (10/20)

In the annals of cynical corporate subterfuges, it would be hard to top the effort by the drugmaker Allergan to fend off a patent challenge by selling its drug rights to a rural New York Indian tribe. ... [Judge William] Bryson didn’t invalidate the tribal deal because that wasn’t at issue in the case before him, but he expressed “serious reservations” about whether the deal should be treated as valid. That could function as a guidepost for the U.S. Patent Office, which will have to rule on the transaction’s validity. Legal authorities say Bryson’s opinion should be taken as a red light by other companies thinking about using the same maneuver. (Michael Hiltzik, 10/19)