- 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...
- 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...
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.
Read the book if you're suffering!
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101210060431/http://podolsky.e...
> 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.
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....
The ability for psychological expectations to cause physical pain and even physical symptoms (like those of an allergic reaction) is relatively well established science.
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.
How I Cured my RSI Pain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1269951 - April 2010 (75 comments)
Lots of Sarno over the years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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.
>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.
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.
I can't know for sure. Though there is this:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/retrain...
> “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.
https://www.zoffness.com/resources
Curable is also a useful resource:
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'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.
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.
A: Read this book.
Only on HN...
This website is a text based medium. Literally the only thing that can conveyed here is information.
Books, as you are aware, can contain even more information and advice than this website.
If the person was looking for something other than information and advice, they would be looking elsewhere.
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.
OP needs to see a doctor first instead of trying to use a placebo.
So while I agree the mind does play a part in chronic pain, it is not necessarily the only part.
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.
> 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.
So, let's say I'm skeptical when it comes to the "mind body connection".