05/21/2025
A woman who has been dependent on opioid painkillers since she injured her back said that a clinic would write prescriptions for her each month only if she first agreed to receive three or four “very painful” injections of another medicine along her spine. She was among thousands of patients of Pain MD, a multistate pain management company. The Department of Justice has successfully argued at trial that Pain MD’s “unnecessary and expensive injections” were largely ineffective because they targeted the wrong body part, contained short-lived numbing medications but no steroids, and appeared to be based on test shots given to cadavers – people who felt neither pain nor relief because they were dead. Read a story from KFF Health News.