What is Opioid Induced Hyperalgesia?

Hyperalgesia means your body feels pain more strongly than it normally would. Something that might only be mildly uncomfortable to someone else could feel much more painful to you. This pain is real – as is ALL pain – but often this condition can be provoked by the very medication being taken to reduce it.

How Do Opiates Provoke Hyperalgesia?

Opiates (like morphine, oxycodone, or fentanyl) are often used to reduce pain. At first, they work really well. But over time, your body starts to change in response to these drugs:

1. More Pain Receptors: Your brain actually creates more pain receptors to try to balance out the effects of the opiates.
2. More Sensitive Receptors: These receptors also become extra sensitive, making even small pain signals feel very intense.

So instead of helping in the long run, opiates can make your body more sensitive to pain—this is what we call opioid-induced hyperalgesia.

Why Detox Alone Isn’t Enough

Stopping opiates (detoxification) is a necessary first step, but it doesn’t automatically fix the changes in your brain. If the brain has become wired to feel more pain, you need more than just to remove the drug—you have to retrain your brain.

How Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) Helps

Pain Reprocessing Therapy is a treatment that helps people with chronic pain retrain their brains not to overreact with fear and panic to pain signals. It’s based on the idea that chronic pain can sometimes be caused by the brain continuing to send pain signals even when the original injury has healed. This is called neuroplastic or neural pathway pain.

PRT helps by:

• Teaching the brain that certain sensations aren’t dangerous
• Changing how you think about and respond to pain
• Reducing the brain’s tendency to “amplify” pain signals

Putting It All Together for Lasting Relief

To truly heal from chronic pain, especially when it’s been made worse by opioids, you need a two-part approach:

1. 1. Detoxification – removing the opioids so your body can start to reset
   2. Neuropathic Recovery – like Pain Reprocessing Therapy, to help your brain calm down its pain system

Together, these steps give your brain the chance to heal and break the fear/pain cycle, leading to real, lasting relief.