Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
THE PAIN BROKERS
How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America's Lawsuit Factory
A work of nonfiction
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.
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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 re-victimize 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.
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As Burch unfurls the story, 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.
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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.
PRAISE FOR THE PAIN BROKERS
"As gripping and important as Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain and Gardiner Harris' No More Tears, The Pain Brokers is a righteous bolt of reportage worthy of acclaim."
- Booklist (starred review)
"Rigorous and horrifying, this real-life tale of greed run amok will leave readers reeling."
- Publisher's Weekly
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"It's hard to imagine how a single book could tell a story that's so infuriating, so riveting, so disappointing, and so inspiring all at once, but that's what Burch has pulled off in The Pain Brokers. Burch's book is a powerful and timely reminder that there's strength in numbers—and that we're all better off not only when we're looking out for each other, but when we're not afraid to call out the bad actors in our midst."
- Stephen Vladeck, New York Times bestselling author of The Shadow Docket
"In The Pain Brokers, Burch vividly brings to life the scandal on which she is America's leading voice—how plaintiff's lawyers and their allies turn the suffering of patients into profit mills."
- Barry Meier, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Pain Killer
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"Burch delivers a pulse-pounding legal thriller that hooks you from the start and leaves you gasping for air at the end. It's a devastating account of a wild scheme—orchestrated by greedy lawyers and con men—that preyed on vulnerable women and subjected them to unnecessary surgeries. Burch has done the nation a valuable public service by exposing a legal system rotten to the core." - Eric Eyre, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Death in Mud Lick
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"Burch reports and tells the hell out of this story. In the process, she eviscerates a band of rogue operators, working at the fringes of the medical and legal professions, while reminding us that the best authors wield transformative power when they face down the ugliest truths." - John T. Edge, author of House of Smoke & Emmy-winning host of TrueSouth
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"Award-winning legal scholar and natural-born storyteller Burch presents a fabulous tale of scams run out of call centers, misguided patients flying cross-country for expensive surgeries they don't need, rogue lawyers and their medical sidekicks raking in easy money, and a couple of ethical lawyers trying to sort out the mess." - Melissa Fay Greene, two-time National Book Award finalist and author of Praying for Sheetrock and The Underdogs
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Photo Credit: Peter Frey
I am a lover of stories who always aspired to be a storyteller. When I was a child, I stayed up late with classic mysteries—Nancy Drew and anything by Agatha Christie. Since then, I've become a nationally known expert on mass torts and have written two seminal academic books in my field, Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation (Cambridge University Press 2019), and The Law of Class Actions and Other Aggregate Litigation (Foundation Press 3d ed. 2020) (co-authored), along with more than 40 law review articles.
Though I love academic work (and am a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law), I yearned to tell true stories that could help consumers, especially women, seize their own power and find justice in a system stacked against them. After 20 years of writing mostly legalese, I found the mentoring I needed to turn the injustices of mass-tort litigation into an irresistible book for general readers by joining the MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism. I spent my MFA years reporting and writing this book and graduated in August 2023.
My unique strengths come together in The Pain Brokers. I’m a scholar who thrives on complexity and a writer who loves an action story where villains and heroes clash while the women in the eye of the storm hang on for dear life.
Women’s health issues are in the headlines every day, and tensions are high between female consumers and the medical-industrial complex. Even in a society where gender is not supposed to matter, at the heart of this con are devices that are implanted only in women, intended to address chronic health issues that women are often afraid to discuss.
But I’m not silenced, and neither are Barb, Sharon, or Jerri, the three women who spoke with me. We have true stories to tell. I'll hope you'll read them.
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