The Great Pain Deception: Faulty Medical Advice Is Making Us Worse by Steven Ray Ozanich challenges conventional approaches to chronic pain, revealing how psychological stress, trauma, and unprocessed emotions drive physical suffering. This book is highly relevant to the Center for Integrative Neuroscience, as it aligns with our mission to bridge neuroscience, trauma-informed care, and integrative medicine to improve patient outcomes.
 
Why This Book Matters to Our Work
✔ The Mind-Body Connection in Chronic Pain – Ozanich builds on the work of Dr. John Sarno, showing how repressed emotions and psychological stress manifest as real, debilitating pain. This aligns with our focus on how neurological and metabolic dysregulation contribute to pain syndromes.
✔ Beyond the Biomedical Model – The book critiques the overuse of pharmaceuticals, unnecessary surgeries, and faulty medical narratives that fail to address the root cause of pain. At the Center for Integrative Neuroscience, we emphasize neuroplasticity, neuromodulation, and metabolic therapies as alternatives to symptom-masking treatments.
✔ Healing Through Awareness & Nervous System Regulation – Ozanich highlights how chronic pain can be relieved by shifting subconscious patterns, reducing fear, and reprogramming the nervous system. This ties into our work in trauma-informed mental health care, stress reduction, and integrative approaches to healing.

✔ The Role of Stress, Cortisol & Metabolism – Chronic pain is deeply linked to hormonal imbalances, mitochondrial dysfunction, and prolonged fight-or-flight responses. The book’s insights support our bioenergetic perspective on healing, where metabolic health and nervous system regulation are key to long-term recovery.
 
By exposing the flaws in conventional pain management and offering a deeper understanding of the brain-body connection, The Great Pain Deception aligns with our approach to restoring health through neuroscience, metabolic optimization, and integrative therapies.