The central claim of this book (from reading Amazon reviews) seems to be that chronic pain may be caused by mental/emotional distress. To me, this seems like a remarkable claim, and I'm super-skeptical without some kind of evidence.
Out of curiosity, does the author offer any such evidence in the book? Are there other books on the topic?
However, despite me thinking the book was rubbish and tossing it shortly, my RSI problems disappeared. I guess the suggestion that pain wasn't actually physical in source was enough for the pain to stop.
I've gone from being dominated by RSI problems to not giving it much thought at all.
The placebo effect is real, sometimes even when the patient is aware that it's a placebo.
Note: I don't think the book is correct. There are plenty of phenomenon that we don't understand, and not having a real explanation is not reason to just make one up and assert its correctness without evidence.
I actually think Sarno explains quite well why the placebo effect works in many cases. It works because the pain is caused by psychological issues to begin with, so when you receive a placebo, your mind knows to make it go away and shift to a different problem. He actually calls it a "nocebo" because it doesn't actually make it go away. For example, you may have back pain, do some kind of therapy to address it (whether it is chiropractic adjustments, massage, medication, cortisone injections, or even surgery); it goes away, but then a week later you start having wrist pain, and the cycle continues (maybe with the back pain coming back) until you address the underlying repressed emotions.
http://aaroniba.net/articles/tmp/how-i-cured-my-rsi-pain.htm...
I'm a skeptic myself, trained as a scientist with degrees in physics from Harvard and Caltech. The technique from the book seems like it couldn't possibly work, but it did. As noted before, YMMV.
Then however, they found that actually, those anomalies were just as likely in people experiencing back pain as in people with no symptoms at all. Now they were back to square one and did not know where back pain actually came from.
Funny enough, back pain can most reliably be lifted by seeing a doctor. It does not matter whether the dictor prescribes some medication, arranges for surgery or does nothing at all.
In many cases (not just back pain) simply seeing a doctor increases your chances of getting better way more than any particular therapy. Humans are weird animals.
This is a TED video by Moseley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwd-wLdIHjs
And this is a good summarizing post about pain science: http://www.bettermovement.org/2010/seven-things-you-should-k...
I recommend reading the entire contents of conquerrsi.com (gone, but still accessible on archive.org), thinking about that while your read sarno.