Board-certified neurosurgeon Dr. Betsy Grunch, aka @ladyspinedoc, tells Fox News Digital the tragic death of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO can teach the ‘biggest learning lesson’ of better understanding and taking care of chronic pain patients.
Pinched nerves, herniated discs, spinal fusions — if you’ve experienced any of these, the pain can quite literally impact your every move.
Dr. Betsy Grunch, also known as @ladyspinedoc on social platforms, is connecting the dots on how the suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO gunman, Luigi Mangione, and his alleged back injury likely pushed him to the edge.
“Pain in general affects our mental well-being, how we go on in our day-to-day life and function. If you’re reminded of an injury in your body, and you live in pain, it can be something that really rattles you,” the board-certified neurosurgeon told Fox News Digital.
“In this alleged circumstance, you have a 26-year-old, fit guy that has an injury and needs care,” she continued, “and he may reflect his pain on someone else or blame it on someone else. And [that] can escalate to a point of suicidal or even homicidal thoughts.”
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Reports have surfaced that Mangione, the former Ivy League computer scientist charged in the ambush shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, struggled with back pain and the fallout from spinal surgery.
Suspected shooter Luigi Mangione is led into the Blair County Courthouse for an extradition hearing in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. (Getty Images)
Mangione told former roommates that he suffered from chronic back pain and a pinched nerve, according to CivilBeat, a Honolulu-based publication.
He had allegedly written online about his injury and reviewed back pain-related books on his Goodreads account, Fox News reported. Investigators were also looking into whether the health insurance industry had denied a claim from him or withheld some kind of care.
“Your spine is something that is your entire core of your body. You use it any time you stand, move, bend, twist anything. And so to have pain in [the] dead center of your body with every movement, and if you have nerve type impingement pain, it can be 10 out of 10. And for those of us that think we know 10 out of 10 pain, unless you’ve had an injury to your spine, you know what that’s like,” Grunch, who has nearly 4 million followers combined on social media accounts, explained.
“Then if you amplify that on someone that has such a life-changing event, and to think that there’s no end in sight, it can be quite detrimental and life-changing.”
Grunch noted that 90% of Americans will face back pain at some point in their lives, and the average U.S. rate for insurance claim denials is up 23% since 2016, according to the American College of Healthcare Executives.
“Our industry is no innocent victim here. On the physician side, the stuff that we can provide to patients can be quite costly. And so, obviously, the insurance company has to have a way to mitigate and kind of control those costs. But [by] the same token, as a physician, when you have a patient that’s in pain, and you know a certain treatment is necessary or needed to help alleviate their symptoms, to have to deal with going through prior authorizations, denials, appeals, [it] can be very challenging and frustrating for the physicians,” the popular neurosurgeon said.
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The relationship between physicians and insurance companies can sometimes be symbiotic, Grunch claimed, but she also deals with the claims “fight” every day.
“There is not a day that goes by that I am not fighting for something that I feel is justified for my patient, whether that be a conversation with another physician from the insurance company, whether that be prior authorizations for medications, or MRIs or imaging studies. It is something that we deal with day in and day out,” she said.
“But who ends up taking the brunt of all of that weight, all of those back and forths, is the patient,” Grunch stressed. “And that’s the real center of the issue is, I think we become almost jaded.”
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Police have not immediately publicized a potential motive for the murder, but alleged that Mangione admitted to the crime in writing and left behind other clues, including bullet casings with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on them and a backpack full of Monopoly money.
In social media accounts believed to belong to Mangione, he posted an X-ray photo of screws and a plate attached to someone’s lower back. Much of his content on Instagram showed him traveling to tropical destinations, hiking and being outdoors. He also discussed back pain and retweeted content about technology, AI, nutrition and other subjects.
Grunch explained that what starts as acute pain can lead to chronic pain. There are also different levels of navigating and treating that pain.
“It’s important to kind of understand how we can prevent back pain and even hopefully educate our population to become healthier so we can prevent some of these situations. But the bottom line is, it is very prevalent,” she said.
“You can see that in his Goodreads books, he’s supposedly trying to educate himself on ways to help himself. And I think as providers, we can do a better job of doing that along the way to help reduce claims,” Grunch expanded. “It’s definitely a two-way road, and I think there’s a lot of growth that has to happen from the insurer side and from the health care industry side.”
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Fox News national correspondent Bryan Llenas reports on the arrest of Luigi Mangione, a suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, on ‘Your World.’
“I think the biggest thing in this case is, we all want to kind of point fingers at the industry. And I’m not saying that’s not what we need to do, but I think that just understanding our patients, the level of pain and how pain can really affect us as humans and can be life-changing and how we can potentially intervene to help people get out of situations to where they feel helpless and that they have to resort to violence to help them kind of feel like they’ve accomplished something,” she said.
“I think that’s the biggest learning lesson, is understanding chronic pain patients, how we can help them out of situations like this, how we can better take better care of them and, in general, just take better care of our patients and understanding them.”
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Fox News’ Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.
