Recently, Dutch investigative programme Zembla aired an episode on the growing opioid crisis in the Netherlands. Doctors speaking out. Patients in despair. A healthcare system watching an American nightmare slowly repeat itself on European soil.

It was brave television. It was necessary television.

And it stopped just short of saying the most important thing.

The Bell Is Ringing. Nobody Knows Where the Clapper Is.

The doctors interviewed in the programme said something significant, almost in passing.

That chronic pain is complex. That it’s often driven by emotions, life history, social environment, stress and not always purely a physical, mechanical problem.

And then… the conversation moved on.

As if they’d opened a door, glanced through it, and quietly closed it again.

I understand why. The medical world is built on protocols, prescriptions, and measurable outcomes. Emotions don’t show up on an MRI. Social environment doesn’t have a billing code. And so the conversation defaults to what’s familiar: medication management, dosage adjustments, referrals.

But here’s what I need to say out loud:

We already know what’s behind that door. And for many people in chronic pain, it can change everything.

It’s the science of how repressed emotions keep your brain in pain and how to teach it something new.

What Opioids Actually Do to Chronic Pain

Let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with.

Opioids don’t heal chronic pain. They mute it — temporarily — while the underlying cause continues, untouched.

Oxycodone is one of these opioids. And currently one of the most overprescribed. It was never designed to treat chronic pain. It was developed for post-surgical pain and terminal cancer patients. People in severe, end-stage suffering. Somewhere along the way, it became a routine prescription for chronic back pain, headaches, and nerve pain. That shift has consequences.

Over time, opioids make the nervous system more sensitive, not less. A phenomenon called opioid-induced hyperalgesia means that the very medication prescribed to reduce pain can eventually increase it. The brain, flooded with synthetic pain relief, recalibrates its sensitivity upward.

More pain. More medication. More dependency. Less life. And at its worst: less time…..

Opioids — including prescription painkillers like oxycodone — are increasingly appearing in overdose deaths, and thousands of people die from opioid-related overdoses every year. Dependency can develop within weeks. Overdose can happen even at prescribed doses, especially when combined with other medication. 

This is a documented and measurable risk. And yet people with chronic pain are still being handed prescriptions for oxycodone the way they once were handed anti-inflammatory pills – as a first resort, not a last one.

The Zembla episode showed us the human cost of this. People who began with a legitimate injury and ended up trapped in a cycle they never chose. People who wanted their lives back and instead lost more of them.

Their pain was real. The treatment was not the answer.

What Pain Science Has Known for Years. But Medicine Hasn’t Caught Up With

In the early 1970s, Dr. John Sarno — a rehabilitation physician at NYU — published findings that would go on to quietly revolutionise our understanding of chronic pain.

His observation: the majority of his patients with persistent back pain, neck pain, and other chronic symptoms had no structural cause that correlated with their experience of pain. And those who did have structural findings, like disc bulges or arthritis, showed no consistent match between what was visible on the scan and the pain they actually felt. But they did share a psychological profile. High achievers. People pleasers. Overthinkers. Perfectionists. People who had learned — often from childhood — to repress difficult emotions rather than express them.

His conclusion: chronic pain is frequently the brain’s way of diverting attention away from overwhelming emotional material. A neurological protective mechanism, not a structural failure.

Decades later, neuroscience has caught up. We now understand this through the lens of neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to learn and reinforce patterns, including pain patterns. Chronic pain is often a learned response, running on neural pathways that were once helpful and have long since overstayed their welcome.

This is not “it’s all in your head.” This is “your head and your body are the same system. And that system can change.”

The field of Pain Reprocessing Therapy, research from the Boulder Back Pain Study, the work of physicians and researchers like Dr. Howard Schubiner, Dr. David Clarke, and many others — all point to the same conclusion:

Chronic pain, in a significant number of cases, can be resolved. Not managed. Resolved.

Not through stronger medication, but through understanding what the brain is doing and teaching it something new.

From this growing body of knowledge, a new field emerged: mind-body practitioners — trained to work at exactly that intersection of brain, emotion, and pain.

What Chronic Pain Recovery Actually Looks Like

Most people who discover this approach have tried everything first.

Multiple specialists. Physiotherapy. Injections. Surgery, sometimes. Medication that helped for a while, then didn’t, then caused its own problems.

By the time they reach a mind-body practitioner, they’re exhausted and sceptical. Reasonably so.

What shifts is not a miracle. It’s an understanding.

When someone genuinely grasps that their pain is real —and that it is being generated by a brain responding to unprocessed emotions— something loosens. Not immediately. Not always quickly. But the trajectory changes.

In practice, mind-body practitioners work with the brain and its emotional patterns. With repressed emotions. With the deeply ingrained patterns — perfectionism, self-suppression, chronic self-pressure — that keep the brain generating pain. Using evidence-based tools: somatic awareness, emotional processing, brain retraining, nervous system regulation used correctly as a bridge rather than a band-aid.

People can go from housebound to hiking. From managing symptoms to no longer needing to. From “I’ve been told I’ll have to live with this” to living without it.

The Real Problem Isn’t the Prescription. It’s the Knowledge Gap

We don’t just have a prescribing problem. We have a knowledge gap problem.

As long as the medical system doesn’t have better answers for chronic pain, it will keep reaching for the tools it has. And opioids are a tool. A strong one, but with serious risks.

That knowledge — as described in this blog — exists. It just hasn’t reached enough consulting rooms yet.

Everyone Who Watched That Zembla Episode Deserves to Know This

I watched that programme with a heavy heart.

Not because the problem was being named. That was a relief. But because the people watching it, the ones who saw themselves in those stories, deserve to hear the rest of the story too.

They heard: Your pain is real, opioids are dangerous, the crisis is growing.

What they didn’t yet hear: What can you do about it?

And that gap — between naming the crisis and pointing toward the exit — is exactly where too many people fall through.

The doctors in that programme are asking the right questions. That matters. The missing piece isn’t their fault. It’s simply not in their curriculum yet.

I know some of you watching that programme are far beyond a bad back. Years of severe pain, real loss, real limitations. This approach isn’t a magic cure and I won’t pretend otherwise.

But chronic pain that persists long after an injury should have healed, or that has no clear explanation despite all the scans and tests – that is exactly where the mind-body approach changes things. More often than medicine is currently aware of.

If you watched that documentary and recognised yourself, if you are living with chronic pain and if you are being told there is nothing more to be done — please know this:

That is not the end of the conversation. That is the middle of it.

You are not broken. You are not beyond help. And you don’t have to figure this out alone.

Want To Know More?

If this resonates, feel free to explore further. Whether that’s through my blogs, through your own research, or by reaching out to me or others in this field of work. 

This article has been written with the utmost care. If you spot a factual inaccuracy, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Sources: WHO (2023), Opioid overdose; EMCDDA (2025), European Drug Report: Drug-induced deaths; PubMed (2023), Systematic review of predictors of opioid overdose after prescription; Sarno JE (1977), Psychosomatic backache; Sarno JE (1981), Etiology of neck and back pain. An automatic myoneuralgia?; Sarno JE (1984), Mind Over Back Pain; Vachon-Presseau E (2026), Brain correlates of psychological trauma in chronic pain: A systematic review; Wiech K (2018), Psychological Processes in Chronic Pain: Behavioral Evidence and Neural Circuits; Melzack R & Wall PD (1965), Gate Control Theory of Pain. Moseley GL & Butler DS (2015), Fifteen Years of Explaining Pain: The Past, Present and Future.