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Comment by hollywood_court | Hacker News Reader

I suffered from chronic neck and shoulder pain for years. I had a cervical fusion surgery. I had a labral repair surgery. Neither improved my symptoms at all.

I slept maybe 3-4 hours per night for ~7 years.

Then one day I saw someone on Hacker News mention Dr. Sarno's book, and it changed my life.

I convinced myself that the pain was all in my mind. I'm still not 100% symptom free, but I now have far more good days than I do bad days.

I read all of his books and I try to re-read the first one at least once per year.

It become convenient for me to blame my problems on my chronic pain. I fixed all of that by simply changing the way I thought about the pain.

Now, whenever I feel the pain flaring up, I just make myself focus on my breathing rather than focusing on the pain. And then I simply forget about the pain.

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> Then one day I saw someone on Hacker News mention Dr. Sarno's book, and it changed my life.

I learned of Dr Sarno from HN several years ago. I bought 2 books of his, and did my best to implement what he wrote.

It made no improvement to my pain (very similar pain as the author).

I definitely don't mean to turn people away from Sarno's treatments. I have definitely met folks who have never heard of Sarno, but whose pain evolution and eventual management aligns with what Sarno has in his book, so if you do have that type of pain definitely check it out.

But don't blame yourself if it doesn't.

Does he talk about exercising while in pain at all? This has been something that really worked for me after tearing my achilles. After 8 months it still felt irritated 24/7 and I was terrified of re-injury, but ramping up the intensity of my ankle/calf exercises started to make it better. The harder exercises were probably having a minimal impact on strength, but they were having a huge effect on convincing my brain that the area was fine and it could drop its obsession with it.

He doesn't specifically mention exercising IIRC. Although I found that lifting is another tool I can use to distract myself from the pain.

He does encourage patients to stop any and all forms of physical therapy. I had already stopped PT by the time I read his first book. But I do remember thinking that the PT was making it worse.

All of the stretching and specific exercises were only causing me to focus on the pain even more which lead to even more pain.

From what I can recall, he does encourage people not to stop exercising when they experience psychosomatic pain. The idea is that stopping exercise because of pain gives it validity.

But I would add that one should be careful when exercising and stop as soon as the pain is more than a nuisance. I have pain in my ankle and after trying to sprint through the pain I couldn't walk for a couple weeks. Then when I started going on really easy runs and slowly ramping up the time/pace, it finally started to improve.

Exactly the same as me except more general health anxiety symptoms that turned into real painful symptoms. I learnt about Dr Sarno from Dan's channel on YouTube Pain Free You. So glad you found similar!

At the risk of discounting a genuine anecdote, I feel inclined to point out that the grandparent and parent post exactly model a very trendy type of spam that I've noticed appearing in YouTube comment sections at an ever-growing rate; especially in self-help and financial-advice areas.

I guess it's impossible to prove whether someone's anecdote is genuine or not. I'd at least suggest people try visiting a YouTube financial advice video, read the comments, and you'll see this pattern like every ten comments.

Uh, I wrote my post myself. I am not affiliated with Sarno or his books at all. His books actually offer no kind of treatment method. Their main message is simply that pain originates in the mind and focusing on it only makes it worse.

Edit: I'm pretty sure this is the post that first taught me about Sarno. Just based on my comment like history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495146#32541341

I need to similarly vouch here that I am a real human! I am just a software engineer in the UK with no financial ties to any of this stuff. I just found it the most effective thing after having countless diagnostics, treatments, psychotherapy visits and more. It’s real (at least for me) and I’m so fascinated by it because I’m annoyed it took me so long to discover. 8 years I suffered.

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