Book Review #9
It is about nine months since I read the book "Healing Back Pain, The Mind-Body Connection" by John Sarno (1991) and benefitted tremendously with a major relief from my chronic back pain episodes. Since then, I referred the book to two of my friends who suffered from debilitating back pain & came back with successful results and one of them Hariharasudhan R asked me to write this summary to benefit anyone who may be following my posts.
- Back Pain, Neck Pain, Carpel Tunnel Syndrome are all Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI) and Dr. Sarno states that these are psychosomatic in nature, meaning the pain is induced mainly my unconscious emotional factors
- These emotions are usually "unacceptable emotions", meaning they are emotions that threaten our own self-image of ourselves. We typically like to think of ourselves as intelligent, successful, likeable, patient, a good son and a good parent. When situations threaten this self-image, the brain shoves these threatening emotions into the unconscious mind as repressed emotions.
- Some of these emotions are very strong and the brain cannot tuck them away so easily and so creates an intelligent distraction by focusing on muscles that have strain and reduce the blood flow to those muscles causing the experience of severe muscle spasms and pain. Heat therapy or traction or ultrasound or electric pulse treatment, often provides temporary relief, but the pain returns again
- The tough idea to accept for a person with pain is that while there is usually a structural abnormality associated with it like a herniated disc or slip disc or tendonitis or sciatica or tennis elbow or plantar fasciitis, these structural abnormalities are not the cause of the pain. Research shows that there are 1000s of people with all these structural abnormalities but absolutely no pain symptoms
- The Mind and Body work in such a way that it chooses the right type of pain syndrome that are least attributable to your emotional tension like the back pain or sometimes conditions like ulcers or irritable bowel syndrome. He gives the name "Tension Myositis Syndrome" (TMS) for such conditions.
- To cure yourself of your TMS condition, the first step is for you to accept the TMS diagnosis. If you continue to believe that some structural abnormality is causing your pain, you will not be cured. And it is very important to immediately resume all your normal activities without fear. If you keep the fear in your mind, the pain symptoms will return. This is the most difficult thing and if you manage this then you will overcome your TMS condition quickly.
- In the book Dr. Sarno gives many real-life examples that will help you understand that this is not some "pseudo-science" saying that the pain is all in your head. The pain is indeed real but by understanding that the real source of pain are repressed emotions you can beat your mind and win over the pain.
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