Healing Back Pain The Mind Body Connection
Healing Back Pain promises permanent elimination of back pain without drugs, surgery, or exercise. It should have been titled Understanding TMS Pain, because it discusses one particular cause of back pain–Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS)–and isn’t really a program for self-treatment, with only five pages of action plan (and many more pages telling why conventional methods don’t work). According to John E. Sarno, M.D., TMS is the major cause of pain in the back, neck, shoulders, buttocks, and limbs–and it is caused not by structural abnormalities but by the mind’s effort to repress emotions. He’s not saying that your pain is all in your head; rather, he’s saying that the battle going on in your mind results in a real physical disorder that may affect muscles, nerves, tendons, or ligaments. An injury may have triggered the disorder, but is not the cause of the amount or intensity of the resulting pain. According to Sarno, the mind tricks you into not facing repressed emotion by making you focus on pain in the body. When this realization sinks in (“and it must sink in, for mere intellectual appreciation of the process is not enough”), the trick doesn’t work any more, and there’s no need for the pain. (Healing Back Pain should not be used for self-diagnosis. Always consult a physician for chronic or acute back pain.) –Joan Price
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Got rid of my sciatica and back spasms!
I remember my first true back spasm in college: I bent down to get something out of a drawer and for no apparent reason, my back “snapped.” I was walking crooked for days. I tried laying still, struggling through some sit ups (I recalled a friend in high school who had been given such “back strengthening” exercises for his back pain) and just hoping it would go away. From time to time, my back would “go out” again and I’d suffer for a few weeks as it slowly healed and I tried to take it easy. One time, my back hurt so bad, I had to take several minutes just to get out of bed!
In 2005 I was vacationing at my parents’. I spent many hours on the floor playing games with my brothers and my kids. I noticed a slight numbness in my leg.At first I thought it was constantly falling asleep from being cross-legged on the floor for hours. It gradually grew and traveled down my leg until I had full blown sciatica (with lower back pain too)! One day, browsing at Barnes & Noble, I was looking for some sort of book about back pain and how to get rid of it. I found this book. I read through it quickly and a day or two after I finished it, the sciatica was completely gone. It has never come back and the worst I ever get is a “stiff” back which is easily dealt with through the principles of the book.
The essential thesis is this: Back pain (as well as several other ailments) is caused by an unconscious denial of blood to a certain part of your body. Your brain does this subconsciously to take you away from dealing with the things that are actually causing stress, anger and anxiety. This is NOT saying that the pain is “all in your head.” It’s an acknowledgment of real pain. But that pain has a cause. The essential steps for dealing with the pain are: (1) Living, working, acting normally as if your back is not injured, that is, not favoring it, “going easy” on it, etc. and (2) identifying what is causing you anger or stress and dealing consciously as necessary with the issue.
After I read that, I actually could trace the beginning of my pre-sciatica numbness to an email I had gotten regarding work which had really made me angry. Once I realized what I was really upset about, the pain was gone. In the days since I’ve read this book, my back has only once or twice really “snapped” and I immediately began going through the events and frustrations of my mind. The pain is usually gone within a day. Even that is quite rare now and whenever I have a stiff back, I simply do the same thing: run a mental catalog of stressful or anger-inducing items while doing nothing to favor or “baby” the back and the pain fades.
The author, Dr. Sarno, describes this important mind-body connection in a way that poles some fun at current medical practice (so many ways to treat a bad back? Why? Because who knows what will work? The problem isn’t the back! It’s the things causing your brain to mess with your back!). Dr. Sarno can get a little Freudian sometimes and even recommends deep Freudian therapy to bring out the worst of the issues that your brain might be trying to block. But other than that, I think his thesis is a solid one. It’s certainly attested to by others but I have the best evidence of its truth: It worked. Plain and simple. I no longer get nasty back spasms that leave me walking crookedly for weeks on end. And when my back does get stiff, then that is now a signal that I need to run a mental check and deal with the things that are bothering me that my mind is avoiding.
I’ve read and used the book. It’s worked for my wife. The principles have been useful with the kids (“growing” pains) and I’ve ordered and given copies to friends. Call it bunk if you like but the thesis sounds good to me and it works!
1 Star Not buying the hype…
Give me a break! Gentle exercise, massage and learning proper biomechanics is working. Believing there are emotions I am not addressing just doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t hold anger in. Either I journal, meditate, or read somebody the riot act when I am angry! I don’t give it a chance to do me harm. As far as I’m concerned, I can’t see how unacknowledged anger in my life is causing me back pain. I seem to be one of those who don’t fit the profile of the fuming, seething individual who has emotional turmoil and indeed has lost touch with his/her emotions. For that readership, I guess they give the book five stars.
Save your money and go buy a nice journal instead. Do you a world of good.
5 Stars This book is the answer i’ve been looking for!
2 weeks I’ve waited for this book.
1 week it took me to read it.
7 yaers of agony and pain ended last week after reading this book.
I can’t believe it!
Pain that has been my evel companion and dictated every aspect of my life – gone!!!
Sometimes I feel the pain trying to come back, sneak on me, but now I know why it’s there and I can make it disappear again after 5 minutes or so.
This is unreal. Its almost ridiculous.
I am 33 years old, and for the first time in 7 years – I fill young, and free.
This book is worth more then 7000$ – the amount I payed on painkillers and alternative medicine so far, and no doubt – would have kept on paying for many years to come.
If you ever had back or neck pain that crippled you, while doctors telling you that you have a herniated disc but can’t explain why it hurts so much, or why you are in pain most of the time, even while sitting down – Well, this is the book for you.
You don’t need to be in pain.
You don’t need to be depressed anymore.
Just read this book and be open to what it has to say to you, think about it, really think.
I did and it changed my life, and I recommand this book to anyone who suffers from back & neck pain, and forever greatfull to John E. Sarno for giving me my life back <3.
5 Stars The Best Treatment Formula
I am a professor at a medical school. I have suffered from chronic lower back pain since my 20′s. This book was the best “treatment” I have ever tried. But, it helps to read it more than once. Remember that most of us do not grasp all of the important ideas with just one reading. Also, I highly recommend Dr. Sarno’s other books.
5 Stars The Mind-Body Connection
I first heard of Dr. John Sarno in Dr. Andrew Weil’s book “Spontaneous Healing : How to Discover and Embrace Your Body’s Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself. I believed I had “slipped a disk” while back-packing in Australia. While I was scuba-diving the Great Barrier Reef (and doing my best to pretend I was not in crippling pain) the pain deepened into sciatica. I could barely walk. Wherever I was, at the airport, on the boardwalk, I had to lay on the ground and curl up into a ball in order to walk another few minutes. In New Zealand, as I was hitchhiking from Christchurch to Auckland on big-rig trucks, a physical therapist gave me some exercises he said I’d have to do for the rest of my life. After a year or so of helping, the exercises stopped working. I was so afraid I’d have to have back surgery and/or be crippled for the rest of my life. When I read about Dr. Sarno’s deconstructing the emotional and stress-related mind-body connection in the majority of back pain syndromes, I started to mentally investigate my own back spasms. What was I thinking about when the back pain started? I started to see my own pattern of worry – that I had been attributing to my sitting position in the car, or my shoes for instance to my stresses and deepest fears. As I read more of Dr. Sarno’s carefully detailed investigation into Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), my back pain gradually subsided as I learned the mechanisms of TMS, and deconstructed my own experience of back pain. A year later, I rarely experience back pain, and when I do it’s very minor and just a sign that I need to relax and take care of myself. I can even wear high-heeled shoes and go back-packing again (not at the same time), and all manner of bending over and sitting positions are no problem. I’ve even taken up hula-hooping! One should certainly investigate TMS before considering back surgery. TMS may not be a diagnosis accepted by the entire medical community, nonetheless, Dr Sarno’s approach *WORKS* and it could work for you. It’s as easy as reading a book, critically deconstructing your own experience, and changing the way you deal with stress. I’ll add that reading a book is inexpensive and harmless. Spinal surgery is not. This is even my 2nd copy of this book, because I purchased a copy for someone I cared about who had back pain. I recommend this book to *everyone!!!* Best wishes… 
MT
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