Given how pervasive the term is even in medicine today, I'm curious how true it is.
Specifically, I'm asking about whether Purdue actually came up with the term in this context—not whether the term is scientifically accurate.
No, the term appears years before OxyContin was on the market.
Russel Portenoy likely popularized the term with a 1990 article, but it appears to have been commonly used in the context of cancer pain even before this.
I haven't seen Dopesick, but my understanding is that Portenoy appears and is depicted as a sort of stooge for Opioid manufacturers. This depiction, and claiming 'breakthrough pain' is a corporate sales tactic both fit with the long-term tendency by journalists and academics like Kolodny to portray the entire 'pain as the fifth vital sign' movement as some sort of corporate plant or astroturf movement.
Perdue did pour money into patient activist movements after 1996, And may well have incorporated terminology like "breakthrough pain" into their sales pitches. But corporate greed here dovetailed with a preexisting progressive medical movement to take patient pain and suffering more seriously.
I've run through some of the dynamics of the Opioid Crisis, and problems with the prevailing popular narratives of the Opioid crisis in a previous post.