The Devastation of Back Surgery
Was a spinal fusion the trigger for a descent into murder?
I don’t know why Luigi Mangione lost contact with his family a few months ago and then decided to commit an assassination. I don’t condone violence; I hate it. The people celebrating Brian Thompson’s murder are sick, almost psychopathic. He did not deserve to be killed!
So why would a smart, high-achieving kid do such a thing?
When I found out about the killer’s medical history, one possible scenario must be considered.
Note: I am not, obviously, excusing what he did. I am simply speculating about what might have triggered a psychic break in a young man who was an unlikely candidate for cold blooded murdering.
How an Opioid Crisis Triggered a Chronic Pain Epidemic
Let me tell you about my brother-in-law. He’s an educated professional in his mid-40s who has a bunch of kids and a nice wife (my sister). Let’s call him Matt. He’s a sweetheart, a wonderful dad and husband, and a great guy to have in the family.
In 2021, Matt generously agreed to help a neighbor lift and carry a large wooden deck during the neighbor’s backyard renovation.
Matt is tall and athletic, so he had no problem lifting the deck along with the neighbor. It was a lovely, sunny day. What could go wrong?
Then, in a freak accident that would become the defining moment of Matt’s life, the neighbor tripped and dropped the deck they were both carrying without warning. The heavy deck crashed to the ground yanking Matt’s body forward. That unexpected movement instantly and gravely injured his back.
The injury he sustained is called “Spondylolisthesis at L5/S1 with pars fractures.”
This happens to be the exact same injury, even in the same location, that Luigi Mangione had suffered.
After enduring intense back pain paired with constant radiating pain down his legs, and after trying every possible treatment, Matt finally underwent spinal fusion surgery in 2023.
The same exact surgery Luigi underwent.
Here is Luigi’s fusion hardware, which is what my brother-in-law has also:
Was Luigi being driven a little mad by the pain from his surgery? Here’s a screenshot from his manifesto:
In the manifesto, he also describes his mother’s pain from painful and debilitating neuropathy, where her pain increased and her insurance company (United Healthcare, Luigi’s victim’s company) continually thwarted his efforts to help her.
Luigi’s own back pain was so severe he was unable to do things a lot of young guys like to do:
He and his mother were suffering intense pain and unable to get relief. Luigi was forced to watch his mother suffer. That alone would cause psychological trauma and distress, and paired with his own back issues, he obviously just snapped.
Obama-era Opioid Restrictions
The secret of chronic pain is: you can’t get opioids anymore. Thanks to the Sackler family and the Oxycontin epidemic of the 1990s and 2000s, medical opioid use is severely restricted, even for people recovering from surgery.
Doctors now try to get away with giving you a couple Tylenol or anti-psychotics—yep—after surgeries now. Rare are the days you get a morphine drip. You will be prescribed not quite enough pain pills to get you through the recovery period, because they are so afraid of creating another addict.
After my mother’s hysterectomy, she shared a recovery room with another woman who’d just had one. The other woman’s doctor had prescribed her a morphine drip and she could press a little button when she needed more pain medicine. My mother’s doctor had given her a Tylenol. I had to sit and watch as my mother writhed in agony, begging the nurses for help, for the morphine drip like her roommate had. She was denied. Finally a doctor friend called in a Vicodin prescription for her. And this was 20 years ago! This is a common post-op experience; I’m sure a lot of my readers have experienced something like this or watched a family member go through it.
Millions of people suffer in excruciating pain with zero relief and their families are forced to watch, helpless.
At Matt’s pain clinic, all the chronic pain patients are forced to take regular urine tests to make sure that they aren’t mixing drugs or taking more than they’re supposed to. They also test to make sure they ARE taking their prescribed dose—so they aren’t selling it to addicts.
How humiliating. Treated like a junkie in rehab when you are simply a regular person in torment.
Pain you can’t escape from tends to mess with your head. My brother-in-law’s quality of life has deteriorated significantly. But he has a lot to live for, and a family that loves him and depends on him. I’m not worried about him psychologically.
But in others, it’s easy to imagine how an injury and subsequent surgery could trigger a descent into homebrew psychedelic drug cures and finally, a psychotic break with reality.
Did extreme, chronic pain push him over the edge to extreme thinking and poor decision making? Luigi went from high-achieving, athletic normie to painfully thin assassin in a few years or less.
Could the surgery and the pain have been the culprit?
A friend of Luigi’s from high school claimed that he was “never the same” after the surgery.
“Mangione hadn’t been in touch with relatives since undergoing back surgery several months prior.”
Matt’s injury and subsequent surgery left him in debilitating pain. He’s lost significant weight in the last 3 years and is no longer able to play sports, roughhouse with his boys, or carry their one-year old.
Early this year, he went to a specialist for an radio frequency ablation procedure in an attempt to block the nerves. Unfortunately, this treatment made his pain 50% worse. It fixed the pain in his legs but instead of eliminating it, it simply localized it in one location on his spine—and created new nerve damage.
Matt lives in a constant state of 7 out of 10 pain. He has spent three-plus years trying everything: physical therapy, microneedling, myofascial massage, TENS units, Gabapentin (gave him a bad reaction), and more.
The only things that enables him to get any relief are the low-dose opioids he is allowed to have. He tolerates it well and like most people, it’s non-addictive for him. He used to take Tramadol, but when you stop it, it triggers some nasty side effects, so now he takes Norco. His dosage is extremely low. It’s so low that it takes the edge of his pain, but that’s all.
As an aside: Tramadol didn't used to be considered an opioid, and it’s even given over the counter in Mexico!
According to Matt, if he was able to get the dosage he needed, he would be able to live like a normal person again, hold his one-year old, take his boys on a hike, be able to sleep normally. He would not be mentally and physically exhausted by the strain of using half his brain to simply bear the pain he lives with all day every day.
“Oh, he just needs more drugs, he’s addicted and he’s just lying to get more.”
No. I repeat: he is not an addict, he never drinks, he refuses to try hallucinogenics, he’s never taken recreational drugs. He hates the feeling of being “stoned.” He’s what people used to call “a square.” He’s not hitting the streets looking for fentanyl. His prescribed pain medications absolutely help him by just targeting the injury site; but he simply needs the dosage increased. And that is not possible according to the current rules.
The Oxy-opioid abuse epidemic made the health care industry extremely risk-averse to giving opioids to people in chronic pain. But in an attempt to prevent more addicts, the medical industry now forces millions of chronic pain patients to live in extreme pain. Many end up killing themselves. Others resort to hunting down street drugs that contain dangerous chemicals that kill them, or turn them into fent junkies.
The fentanyl crisis can be traced back to Obama-era opioid crackdown. If people can’t get relief from the doctor and they are in unbearable pain, they will do what they have to do.
My sister is trying to take care of their children and their lives and try to brainstorm solutions. When Matt has gotten the correct dose of the drug he needs, he can resume his normal life—and he is not high. He is not “on drugs.” He is simply in less pain!
Some states, like Illinois are trying to fix the over-correction that has hurt so many people. More states should relax these laws immediately. This is something the new administration must address.
For more context, here is what she sent me:
This has to stop. We can't allow people to suffer needlessly when there are medications out there that can help them. Adults should be able to choose what they put into their bodies. Doctors should give them side effect warnings, and then the patient gets to choose.
The CDC has always conflated two groups: 1) CPPs [chronic pain patients] with valid pain prescriptions and 2) junkies using illegal street drugs.
Conflating those groups is stupid, myopic and cruel. The CDC even recently admitted this, but the damage is already done because states have all enacted harsh opioid penalties on doctors across the country since 2016.
If you separate those two groups, you’d see that 99% of CPP handle their meds just fine. But even though the CDC knows its numbers are totally wrong, the DEA still enacts annual quota reductions every year since 2016. See links below.
Now pharmacies all over the country are running out of opioids now due to these forced shortages by the DEA/CDC. I know of many CPPs who can't get a medicine refilled for 2, 3, 4, even SIX months because they’re out of stock and don't know when they'll get more.
What's so cruel is that this shortage has been INTENTIONALLY CREATED by our government. And it forces these patients to go COLD TURKEY instead of tapering off responsibly. Many people have killed themselves as a result of these forced and intentional shortages created by our own government. Barbaric and cruel.
Trump MUST stop this war on opioids.
https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/3/21/cdc-admits-rx-opioid-deaths-significantly-inflated
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-cdc-guidelines-wrong-many-ways-jory-pradjinski
https://speciosa.org/cdc-painkillers-no-longer-driving-opioid-epidemic-pain-news-network/
https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2023/11/3/dea-plans-further-cuts-in-rx-opioid-supply-in-2024
At HHS, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can help non-addicts like my wonderful brother-in-law get the help he needs. Why can I go to Mexico and buy Tramadol over the counter? Do I need to offer to be my sister-in-law’s (legal!) drug mule and hit Tijuana every couple months? Why should Americans suffer more than Mexican citizens do?
At this point, my sister and Matt are praying that Elon Musk decides to use his Neuralink technology to help alleviate the back pain of chronic pain sufferers.
Elon, if you’re listening: curing chronic back pain should be your next moonshot. You mentioned this at one of your rallies in Pennsylvania in October; my sister and her husband were watching and they haven’t stop talking about you. They’re convinced that you can help Matt, and millions like him. Matt says he’s volunteer as your first guinea pig!
To my readers: Do you have any experience with back surgery, back injury, and treatments, good or bad? Have you also had trouble getting the pain medicine you need? Feel free to share below!
And please pray not only for Brian Thompson, and the Thompson children who lost their father, but for the family of Luigi Mangione, who were in various ways victims of a system that too often does more harm than good.
Finally, please pray for my brother-in-law, who one day with God’s help will find relief!
Thanks for reading.
—Peachy
Peachy, I’m saddened to hear of your brother-in-law’s pain. Do you follow The Midwestern Doctor (The forgotten side of medicine) on Substack? He has been doing a series of articles on DMSO treatments. Many people have tried it and are having success per comments I’ve seen.
I had back surgery over 10 years ago. Fused from neck to tail bone. Extremely hard recovery. Two weeks in hospital. My husband happened to find out where my surgeon parked, and was waiting for him at 5:00 AM in a dark garage to insist on better pain control. I only got it because he could advocate for me and is 6’4”, and completely unafraid of looking like an asshole.