The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America's Lawsuit Factory by Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America's Lawsuit Factory by Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria/One Signal Publishers for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
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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 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.
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Malpractice attorneys advertising their services to fight against things like cancer from asbestos or talcum powder exposure or medical mesh (the topic of this book) on late night television always gave off a feeling of "ick" to me. And it turns out I was not wrong, as I learned in this book from Elizabeth Chamblee Burch. Although I am not of the opinion that all lawyers are bad, there are definitely members of the profession that are unsavory, and we meet some of them in her book. While this is the story of three different women and their search for justice, it is also an indictment of a system that allows them to be exploited in the first place. While you might expect such a work to be dry and difficult to work through, as some nonfiction books can tend to be, Burch's style and focus on the humanity at the center of this story makes this a very readable book, and I found myself invested in the stories behind her cast of characters as much as in the very scheme that she came to expose.

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