Join us for a free In Conversation event with celebrated journalist and professor Elizabeth Chamblee Burch to discuss her new book, The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory. She will be in conversation with Furman’s Professor M. Carmela Epright. ABOUT THE BOOK: 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. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: As one of the country’s leading mass torts experts and talking heads, Burch is frequently quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, The Economist, The Atlantic, ABC News, L.A. Times, Reuters, Forbes, and Bloomberg among many others. She has appeared on NPR, BBC World News, and Al Jazeera English. She is also an in demand speaker, having given guest lectures at Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, Emory, and Illinois in just the past year. ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER: M. Carmela Epright is a Professor of Philosophy at Furman University and a Clinical Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. She has served as a visiting scholar to the Medical University of South Carolina, The University of South Carolina Medical School’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, and to the Institute for Applied Ethics at Dartmouth College. Dr. Epright received her M.A. an...
