UnitedHealthcare shooting suspect Luigi Mangione read books about chronic pain

According to his Goodreads profile, the suspect in last week’s shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO may have suffered from or known chronic pain.

New York officials on Monday identified 26-year-old Luigi Mangione as a person of interest in the case. He was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a city about 275 miles from New York City.

On December 4, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot outside a Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan. As of afternoon, Mangione had not been charged in Thompson’s death.

While the investigation into Thompson’s murder continues, his death has sparked a national conversation about the U.S. health care system and public frustration with health insurance companies. It was reported that bullet casings found at the scene were labeled with the words deny, defend And put downreflecting a sentiment from critics of the insurance industry.

Mangione’s Goodreads profile showed that there were five books on the topic of chronic back pain on his bookshelf. The titles were Becoming a Lithe Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Pain Relief, Injury Prevention, and Optimizing Athletic Performance; Back under control: A spine surgeon’s journey out of chronic pain; Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection; Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic Underlying Most Chronic Illnesses—and How to Fight It It; And Crooked: Outsmart the back pain industry and get on the road to recovery.

The books were added to his list between May 2022 and February 2023.

According to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study published last year, about 21 percent of American adults, or 51.6 million people, live with chronic pain.

“Chronic pain is pain that occurs most days or every day for the past three months; and (severe chronic pain) is pain that limits life or work activities on most days or every day for the past three months,” the NIH said in a May 2023 press release.

“The connections between the widespread burden of chronic pain and the nation’s opioid epidemic underscore the urgency to understand and address the problem of pain,” the press release continued.

Mangione’s Goodreads profile also attracted attention after observers noticed that he left a review of the so-called Unabomber Manifesto earlier this year in which he called Ted Kaczynski an “extreme political revolutionary.”

“It is easy to quickly and thoughtlessly dismiss this as the manifesto of a madman in order to avoid confronting some of the unpleasant issues it identifies. But it is simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society have proven to be,” Mangione wrote in his review.