The parents of a 17-year-old ask you to recommend medical marijuana for their daughter, who was injured in an auto accident six months ago and still has back pain. Hydrocodone and acetaminophen initially helped, but the patient stopped taking the medication because of unpleasant side effects. She told her parents she smokes marijuana "for fun" on weekends and believes it improves the pain. Her parents say they also think medical marijuana would be helpful for their daughter's back pain. They smoke legal marijuana recreationally and feel like it’s a benign drug. This scenario is becoming more common.

With Tommy gone, without my head wrapped around his caregiving, my nights on the couch are starting to fray. I'm getting lonely. I admit that evenings out to theatre, to dinner, to the event I just ordered tickets for, are becoming more appealing. I'm managing my dislike for nighttime driving by using taxicabs. I'm adjusting to getting gussied up as the sky darkens. To prevent head- and eye-droops as the evening wears on, I take catnaps. Slowly, I’m peeling this small and stubborn body off the couch.

Senator David Vitter: A bill to prohibit certain abortion-related discrimination in governmental activities; a bill to prohibit family planning grants from being awarded to any entity that performs abortions; a bill to impose admitting privilege requirements with respect to physicians who perform abortions; a bill to require states to implement a drug testing program for applicants for and recipients of assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program; a bill to clarify eligibility for the child tax credit; a bill to prohibit discrimination against the unborn on the basis of sex or gender.

Joan L. Cannon writes: Maybe what is required is for our culture to teach us how to know when the occasion legitimizes a free response. Tears still are the most common, even the most allowable demonstration of emotion, and nowadays some men can let them fall without feeling utterly shamed. On the other hand, joy, gratitude, tenderness, empathy seem to have built-in limits even now.

One reason for this is what we might call the divorce echo effect. Older individuals are more often in remarriages, not first marriages, and remarriages have long been more likely than first marriages to end through divorce. People who have been divorced in the past are more willing to divorce again in the event a marriage becomes unsatisfying. In contrast, some proportion of those in first marriages are unwilling to divorce even if they have an unsatisfying marriage.

Nearly 42 percent of US adults who drink also report using medications known to interact with alcohol, based on a study from the National Institutes of Health released January 16, 2015. Among those over 65 years of age who drink alcohol, nearly 78 percent report using alcohol-interactive medications.

The more pictures women share through their mobile phones, the more emails they send and receive, and the more frequently they use Twitter, the lower their reported stress. Compared with a woman who does not use these technologies, a women who uses Twitter several times per day, sends or receives 25 emails per day, and shares two digital pictures through her mobile phone per day, scores 21% lower on our stress measure than a woman who does not use these technologies at all.

Wu, lead author of the study, explains that the plot behind a movie like Her (released in 2013) becomes increasingly realistic. The film involves a man who strikes up a relationship with an advanced computer operating system that promises to be an intuitive entity in its own right."The ability to judge personality is an essential component of social living — from day-to-day decisions to long-term plans such as whom to marry, trust, hire or elect as president," said Cambridge researcher Stillwell.