The Pain Brokers

Burch’s book cannot make this right, but it at least provides an account far more accessible and comprehensible than any case record, and no less appalling.” —Casey Cep, The New Yorker Selling the Dream meets Empire of Pain in this shocking, never-told-before story of three women caught in a web of telemarketing scammers, shady doctors, and profit-hungry lawyers who turned fears surrounding a faulty medical device affecting millions of women into a goldmine. For decades, late-night television has blared a familiar refrain: If you or a loved one has been injured by X product… But behind those ads lies a lesser-known world where elaborate scams revictimize the injured. Why else would thousands of women with health insurance take out loans with astronomical interest rates and fly to south Florida to have their pelvic mesh surgically removed at a chiropractor’s clinic? The Pain Brokers, by law professor Elizabeth Burch, is a damning investigation of a scheme made possible by a medical and legal complex that too often views women’s bodies as cash machines and fails to take their pain seriously. As Burch unfurls each level to the scheme, we meet an enthralling cast of characters, from a world class scam artist who reaped tens of millions of dollars at a south Florida call center, to the ultimate white shoe power lawyer who defended Big Pharma but became an unlikely hero, to a newly minted small-town Arkansas attorney who advocated for the unseen and unheard. But at the center are three women, Jerri, Barb, and Sharon, whose lives were upended by the very procedure they were told would save them. A page-turning, urgently necessary work of public service journalism, The Pain Brokers is not only a chilling exposé of a legal system gone awry, but a wake-up call to the ways in which it harms those it is meant to help.