Do not index
By Karen Rea, FNP-BC | Co-Founder, My Injection Training and Regenerative Academy
This week, OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma was finally sentenced in the long-running federal opioid criminal case. For those of us who have spent our careers helping patients climb out of the wreckage this company helped create, the moment is heavy. It's also clarifying.
A federal judge in New Jersey signed off on a $225 million forfeiture to the Justice Department and cleared the path for a broader settlement that could reach roughly $7 billion over 15 years from the Sackler family. Purdue, as we have known it, will cease to exist. By the end of the week, its assets transferred to a new public benefit company called Knoa Pharma, with a board appointed by the states and a stated mission of fighting the very crisis Purdue helped fuel.
Sackler family members who agree to the terms get something else: a shield from future opioid lawsuits. I want to talk about what this really means for patients, for providers, and for the future of pain care in this country.
The Numbers We Cannot Look Away From
Between 1999 and 2023, opioid overdoses killed approximately 806,000 Americans. In 2023 alone, about 76% of all US drug overdose deaths involved opioids. That averages to 217 people every single day. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, neighbors, patients we knew by name.
Purdue's portion of the national opioid settlement landscape comes out to roughly 12.8%. Important, yet still only a fraction of the larger reckoning still underway.
These are not just statistics to me. Every nurse practitioner, every physician, every chiropractor, every PA who has been in the exam room with a patient white-knuckling through chronic pain knows what these numbers actually represent. They are the cost of a system that decided, for far too long, that a pill was the answer.
The 2020 Plea and What It Confessed
The sentencing this week is the next chapter of a story that began with Purdue's 2020 guilty plea. The company admitted it failed to stop its painkillers from being diverted to the black market and that it used doctor-speaker programs to drive prescriptions. Read that again. Speaker programs. Marketing dressed up as education. Doctors on stages, patients in beds, and a pipeline of pills moving in both directions.
Under the new settlement, the Sackler family will pay state, local, and tribal governments, along with some individual victims. Millions of internal Purdue documents are scheduled to be made public. We will learn more. We always do.
Why This Sentencing Is Not the End
I have to be honest with you. A check, even a $7 billion check, does not bring back the people we have lost. It does not restore the years stolen from families. It does not, on its own, change the way pain is treated in America.
What changes that is us.
For 25-plus years in this profession, I have watched the medical system pour patients into a one-way funnel: pain to pill to dependency to despair. Regenerative medicine offers a different funnel entirely: pain to diagnosis to restore to heal. PRP. A2M. Wharton's jelly. Exosomes. Ultrasound-guided injections that actually go where the damage lives. Functional rehab that gives the body back its own ability to repair.
This is not theoretical. I have seen patients walk into clinics on opioids and walk out, weeks later, off them. Back to the golf course, back to their grandkids, back to themselves.
What the Sentencing Should Light a Fire Under
If you are a provider reading this, here is what I hope this week does for you.
It should make you angry enough to learn something new. Every patient you successfully transition off chronic opioid use is a quiet, personal rebuke to the entire Purdue playbook. Every regenerative protocol you master is one less prescription pad they could have monetized.
It should make you bolder in your practice. Patients are hungry, even starving, for an alternative. They are tired of being told their only options are more pills or more surgery. When you offer ultrasound-guided regenerative care done right, they show up. They tell their friends. They get their lives back.
It should make you find your people. Practicing this work in isolation is hard. Practicing it inside a community of providers who share protocols, troubleshoot tough cases, and refer to one another is a completely different experience.
Where We Go From Here: Join Us
This is the moment to build the thing the Sacklers spent decades dismantling: an honest, regenerative, patient-first model of pain care.
The 2027 Regen Summit is where we are putting that vision in one room. Clinic owners, scientific experts, and the leading minds in regenerative medicine are gathering to share the protocols, the business models, and the practical applications that actually work in private practice. Seating is intentionally limited so the experience stays hands-on and intimate. If you want to be part of how pain care looks in the next decade instead of the last one, this is the room. Lock in your seat early at the Regen Event.
The My Injection Training Skool community is where the work continues between summits. Inside MIT on the Skool platform, you get ongoing training, ultrasound guidance walkthroughs, peer case discussions, referral networking, and direct access to providers doing this every day. Over 3,000 practitioners trained, plus a network you can lean on for the rest of your career. Come join us inside the MIT Skool community and start building the practice, and the legacy, you actually want. Visit the MIT Skool community to get started.
The sentencing gavel has fallen. Purdue is dissolving. Knoa Pharma is being born. The headlines will move on by next week.
The patients won't. They are still out there. Still in pain. Still hoping someone, somewhere, has a better answer.
Let's be that answer.
In service,
Karen Rea, FNP-BC