“Ladies and Gentlemen, you have physical symptoms and for some of you they are severe but there is nothing wrong with you. You are perfectly normal from the stand point of how your body works. Your pain is the result of a process initiated by the brain to protect you from feelings that you have inside that the brain considers to be too painful, too sad or too threatening.
We have demonstrated with thousands of patients that the same brain that brings this on can also make it go away”.
Not a direct quote but pretty much what Dr Sarno said at the end of an interview to summarise the condition he discovered – TMS. “Tension Myoneural Syndrome.”
While searching on youtube for “Chronic Pain” one day, I came across a video clip about Back Pain. Not exactly what I was searching for but something made me watch it anyway. The next 20 minutes changed my life.
Here I was at my desk, in pain which I would rate at about 7/10. This Dr was talking about how the standard treatments for back pain were not working. When he dug a little deeper into the histories of his patients he noticed that nearly all of them had a history of other medical conditions which he considered to be of mindbody origin.
The key moment for me was when he mentioned that there were a number of “equivalents”, these were other conditions besides back pain which he also attributed to the same root cause. Then he described my symptoms and in that moment my pain subsided and I wept.
Finally, I had found hope. There was a reason for my pain, an explanation and more importantly a way to cure it. After all these years of believing the prognosis I finally believed I could get better.
His treatment model is ground-breaking and he was completely ignored by his peers. However, his success rate speaks for itself. People have actually got better just from reading his books !!
Discovering Dr Sarno was a life changing moment for me and the real starting point for my healing journey. I’ve read all his books and watched everything I could find online. The most important being a documentary about him called “All the Rage”. Sadly, Dr Sarno passed not long after this was released, a day before his 94th Birthday.
I had so many unanswered questions regarding my condition and Dr Sarno pretty much answered all of them.
The Pelvic Pain treatments I had found all revolved around the massage and manipulation of pelvic muscles. This was intended to help blood flow in those affected muscles. So, Dr Sarno was right, if slight blood flow reduction was used to create the pain, it makes sense that these treatments would provide all but short term relief.
All the Doctors I have met along my journey suggested that reducing stress and relaxing would help. If they were in agreement that stress made symptoms worse surely it would make sense that stress could actually be the root cause ?
I must also add that this route isn’t for everyone. Approximately 80% of the population will dismiss the mindbody phenomenon. If people are not prepared to take this seriously there is no way they will get better. This is why Dr Sarno’s success rate was so high, he only saw people who had nowhere else to go and were open to this possibility. By jumping in with both feet his patients got better.
Despite the vast amount of knowledge I have gained since this breakthrough I will always regard this as the most important part of my healing journey. As dark as it sounds, I would not be here today if I hadn’t watched that video.
You will have heard of the placebo effect but there is something just as powerful which has the opposite effect – the nocebo. For over a decade I had been told repeatedly by the medical world that there was no known cause for my “condition”, no cure and over time it would get worse. It was now time to undo that damage.
Just a Thought 