I'm not sure what the cause of your chronic pain is, but I would highly recommend reading John Sarno's "The Mindbody Prescription." I've dealt with chronic pain for years and it's the only thing that's had any effect. Please, please, don't write it off until you've read the book. Note that Sarno's work focuses on back pain, but it applies to all types of chronic pain (including migraines, which he discusses in the book).
I've suffered from severe chronic back pain for the past 12 years or so, starting at the age of 16. It manifested as sciatica initially, and gradually became more severe. I had flare ups that would last months. It eventually started manifesting as SI joint pain, constantly switching sides.
Over the years I had been to 4 different physiotherapists, tried everything from regular core exercises formulated by Stuart McGill, to Infrared heat bands, climbing alot. It would always come back.
I picked up Sarno's book about 6 months ago and I approached it with a highly skeptical eye. My back pain is nearly completely gone. I have had very minor flare ups that last a day or two, but I just repeat a few mantras and it disappears the next day (whereas before the same kind of flare up would last for months).
I even had MRIs done at the start of the pain, I had multiple bulging disks and even a spine that appeared too straight. For anyone reading, don't let this discourage you. 50% of people who have had bulging disks appear in an MRI don't experience any pain at all!
Sarno's book has some pretty flaky theories behind how the pain manifests and the physiology of it all, but the overaching theme is that repressed anger / anxiety can manifest as severe back pain. Once you recognise this you can lose the pain. I never thought I would fix my back pain, but now I have.
psychosomatic effects are strange, i'm gonna peak at this book
also there are non individualistic leverage to curing the mind/body aspect
I tried a lot of meditation, hygiene and sport, but nothing had as much impact as having a daily life (commute,job,colleagues). It seems we're also very dependent on our context.
> Here is my summary of what I think is most important in Dr. Sarno's theory:
> 1. The mind and the body are linked. Classic example: the placebo effect -- your mind thinks it's gotten a pill that's gonna fix your body, and what do you know, believing that leads to your body fixing itself.
> 2. Not only can the mind-body connection lead to your body healing itself (as with placebos), it can also lead to the body harming itself, or creating pain.
> 3. Now why would your body do this? In my experience, people with chronic RSIs are, deep down, not happy.
Not terribly impressed, especially the last one, try to be happy when you have pain every minute, especially when you were happy beforehand.
From wiki:
> Sarno's most notable achievement is the development, diagnosis, and treatment of tension myoneural syndrome (TMS), which is currently not accepted by mainstream medicine.[...]
> Patients typically see their doctor when the pain is at its worst and pain chart scores statistically improve over time even if left untreated; most people recover from an episode of back pain within weeks without any medical intervention at all.
> James Rainville, a medical doctor at New England Baptist Hospital, said that while TMS treatment works for some patients, Sarno mistakenly uses the TMS diagnosis for other patients who have real physical problems.
This is a mischaracterization of Sarno's work. One doesn't need to be "happy" to have relief of pain. Sarno's thesis is that chronic pain of this sort is caused by unconscious stress/emotions and the mere acknowledgement of the underlying issues is enough to cure chronic pain. Furthermore, Sarno stresses that patients must first undergo physical examinations by their doctor(s) to ensure that the pain isn't caused by anything structural. Only then should one proceed with his treatment. Note that Sarno (who has since passed away) was not some quack--he was a bona fide medical doctor who treated patients at NYU Medical Center's Rusk Institute.
I would ask you to read his books' reviews (of which there are thousands on Amazon). Are all of these people who were cured from many years of pain lying? Are the other commenters in this very thread lying? There is mounting evidence that Sarno's theories are, in fact, of merit--e.g. https://www.bidmc.org/about-bidmc/news/2021/09/researchers-m....
I have no opinion on the book or author in question, but I’m not clear on why you are so dismissive.
The ability for psychological expectations to cause physical pain and even physical symptoms (like those of an allergic reaction) is relatively well established science.
Doctors are very dismissive of chronic pain patients and regularly make you doubt you have anything, generally with language very similar to Sarno's, in my case I had to fight a lot until they found I had a variation of Parkinson's disease, it was very distressing and a huge part of my unhappiness.
Calling a single sceptical statement "counter arguments" is disingenuous at best. The linked bidmc article is a good starting point if you really are interested.
He quoted 3 sentences from the Wikipedia article, in addition to his own. All of which are relevant and valid points.
You didn’t address any of those. Neither did you address his own.
Even if it was only one, reasserting the author thesis, pretending to ask why he is dismissive while ignoring everything he brought is not a constructive contribution. It’s manipulative at best.
I is relatively well established but it is also used by people and physicians to dismiss of sufferers' pain by assuming that psychological aspect are the _sole_ cause of physical symptoms. Blame the sufferers' attitude etc. Quackery at it's very finest.
Helped me too. I still deal with pain but it totally changed my mindset about it and relieved a lot of the suffering associated with the pain. I saw an associate of Sarno’s who co-authored one of his books, she looked at my imaging and was like, I’ve seen way worse than this, you’ll be fine long term, which was a huge concern of mine. That was a decade past now.
Sarno's work comes up periodically on HN, and I always have to chime in to say that it cured my RSI. Everything is still completely, 100% cured at 15+ years. As a developer, I have no idea what I would have done without it, my career would have been over. Here are my previous comments:
Yes same here. For me Sarno gave me my life back and reading my comments it seems it has helped a lot other people here too, so I always chime in too. Here is my comment from 4 years ago and that was the the start of the end of my struggle with pain. (1)
Nowadays I've started doing the wim hof method and it's unbelievable my body can endure 7°c bath and I don't feel that cold or fall sick taking an ice cold baths everyday even during winters. The reason I'm mentioning this is because it really seems our minds are much more capable of things for which common sense goes against.
I think like the way germs were discovered which changed our understanding of medicine, within a few decades it will also become a norm to assess patient's mental condition before checking for physical and hopefully using the mind to cure a lot of disease. I feel like a hippie saying these things but after sarno and wim hof I've become more open to the power of human mind.
For those curious enough for a brief explanation -
>Sarno explains how your unconscious mind can provoke physical pain by manipulating your autonomic nervous system to deprive muscle tissue of oxygen. The book posits that the unconscious does this because of unresolved, unconscious stress that exists deep in your mind. By inducing physical pain, the unconscious creates a distraction that prevents this stress from becoming conscious. You can eliminate the pain by addressing the unconscious stress and becoming consciously aware that the pain is merely a distraction, thus rendering the unconscious's technique unnecessary and ineffective. The book provides specific methods for accomplishing this. I applied these methods and my pain disappeared.
Seems like it could be very effective, and something I'll keep in mind if I ever end up suffering from chronic pain.
Everybody should read Sarno's book. It's a short read and even if it doesn't help your back pain it will probably alleviate something else. My partner and I both had pain that disappeared from reading Sarno. Back and wrist pain are gone.
This might sound snarky I apologize. How do you know that you pain disappeared from reading a book, when it could have been random coincidence?
Or to phrase it the other way: I have had some or the other sort of pain in my life, and these pains did, rather randomly leave. Would I have read a book or done some random ritual at this point in time, I might now misattribute the relief to the random ritual.
This sounds very odd - I read this book with skepticism as a PhD neuroscientist, and found much of it to be completely preposterous, and yet, somehow, it still helped me get back to running after being unable to run properly for 2.5 years. I didn't even have to fully believe the weirder aspects of his theories - the core, and more defensible parts were enough to give me benefits I didn't really expect, as a skeptic.
> “For a long time, we have thought that chronic pain is due primarily to problems in the body, and most treatments to date have targeted that,” Ashar says. “This treatment is based on the premise that the brain can generate pain in the absence of injury or after an injury has healed, and that people can unlearn that pain. Our study shows it works.”
My back was feeling worse and worse until I read the book though. My partner reported the same thing. It could be a coincidence but the book was short, contained a few good lessons, and costs me nothing to recall the information in the future.
Personally I think Sarno is BS. He's telling people what they want to hear and covering up for the failures of of our medical system.
He basically says that your pain is coming from stress from psychological issues and what you need to do is therapy and Journaling.
I believed this nonsense in regards to my own back pain for a long time. Ironically my pain of 5 years started to subside as I gave up these beliefs although I don't think that was causal.
I had a physical injury to my neck muscles. It turned out what I needed was years of rest and pt to that muscle system. No amount of Journaling is going to fix real injuries
I don't think your story should lead you to conclude that his theories are BS. Like clearly a lot of pain has a physical basis. Sarno's argument was that there is a fair amount of pain that does not have a physical basis, and that once structural causes are eliminated one should consider emotional/mental sources for the pain. The fact that you had pain with a structural basis doesn't really suggest that any of that is untrue.
I'm pretty skeptical of what he says, but there is definitely enough smoke that a fire is possible.
No horse in this race, by the way. I've never had chronic pain, I just think the topic is interesting.
My experience is the exact opposite of yours. I was told for 12 years my back pain was caused by bulging discs, having a spine that has a reduced natural curve and also caused by poor posture. I read Sarno's book and I have been pain free since November last year. I have never gone longer than 2 weeks without severe sciatic or SI joint pain.
Please don't dismiss Sarno's work as BS. It may have not been the right fit for you, but it is for countless other people. Sarno's work is aimed at exactly people who don't have a real biomechanical issue like yourself. It's not a one size fits all, nor is Physiotherapy or surgery.
Also in general, Sarno doesn't reccomend journaling to everyone. A simple mindset change works for most people. Worked for me.
As somebody with chronic pain I think Sarno is a total crank. It has been decades and TMS still hasn't been demonstrated in a way that's objectively measurable. He puts forward what should be testable hypotheses about what's going on in the body and yet still can't publish anything showing it's actually happening. When you read the forums for his books it's a bunch of people cultishly telling each other that they need to believe in order for it to work.
I have an intuition that there's a reasoning problem in this comment but I can't point out what exactly this time.
Verbal clues and facial expressions are also pieces of information, so the fact that HN is a text-based medium does not set it apart from other communication mediums only because it conveys information.
People going to HN to ask for help probably do this because they are familiar with this community, not necessarily because it is text-based and probably haven't rationalized this aspect that much.
Anyway, good luck to OP. I don't have any insight on this matter.
This is not without merit and to some degree I suffer from TMS but I also have EDS (hypermobility syndrome) which is a very real physical condition, and the two work in tandem to make life somewhat uncomfortable, to say the least.
So while I agree the mind does play a part in chronic pain, it is not necessarily the only part.
While it might be a possible reason for OP's pain, a lot more often, it's actual physiological issues.
I read this book and it did nothing for me. I had actual medical issues, and I kept going to different doctors and physios until I found one that found the issue and solved it.
OP needs to go see a sports physio and neurologist.
> Chronic pain is an epidemic. 50 million Americans struggle with back pain, headaches, or some other pain that resists all treatment. Desperate pain sufferers are told again and again that there is no cure for chronic pain.
> Psychotherapist Alan Gordon was in grad school when he started experiencing chronic pain and it completely derailed his life. He saw multiple doctors and received many diagnoses, but none of the medical treatments helped. Frustrated with conventional pain management, he developed Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), a mind-body protocol to eliminate chronic pain. He subsequently founded the Pain Psychology Center in Los Angeles to bring his treatment to other pain sufferers.
> PRT is rooted in neuroscience, which has shown that while chronic pain feels like it's coming from the body, in most cases it's generated by misfiring pain circuits in the brain. PRT is a system of psychological techniques that rewires the brain to break out of the cycle of chronic pain.
> The University of Colorado at Boulder recently conducted a large randomized controlled study on PRT, and the results are remarkable. By the end of the study, the majority of patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free. What's more, these dramatic changes held up over time. The Way Out brings PRT to readers. It combines accessible science with a concrete, step-by-step plan to teach sufferers how to heal their own chronic pain.
When my grandmother was in her 20's, her hair turned white and she started losing weight. Convinced it was psychosomatic, the doctors at the time gave her 10 rounds of electroshock therapy. Later it was discovered that she had Addison's disease, an autoimmune condition. All she needed was some medication.
So, let's say I'm skeptical when it comes to the "mind body connection".
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jQtmSZetJM
- https://aaroniba.net/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain
- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/well/mind/john-sarno-chro...
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/well/chronic-pain.h...