Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection - Softcover

Sarno MD, John E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446557684 ISBN 13: 9780446557689

Publisher: Grand Central Life & Style, 2010

Synopsis

Dr. John E. Sarno is a medical pioneer whose program has helped thousands upon thousands of people overcome their back conditions--without or drugs or dangerous surgery. Now, using his groundbreaking research into TMS (Tension Myositis Syndrome), Dr. Sarno goes one step further: after identifying stress and other psychological factors in back pain, he demonstrates how many of his patients have gone on to heal themselves without exercise or other physical therapy. Find out: Why self-motivated and successful people are prone to TMS; How anxiety and repressed anger trigger muscle spasms; How people "train themselves' to experience back pain; How you may get relief from back pain within two to six weeks by recognizing TMS and its causes. With case histories and the results of in-depth mind-body research, Dr. Sarno describes how patients recognize the emotional roots of their TMS and sever the connections between mental and physical pain... and how, just by reading this book, you may start recovering from back pain today.

About this title

Review:

Healing Back Pain promises permanent elimination of back pain without drugs, surgery, or exercise. It should have been titled Understanding TMS Pain, because it discusses one particular cause of back pain--Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS)--and isn't really a program for self-treatment, with only five pages of action plan (and many more pages telling why conventional methods don't work). According to John E. Sarno, M.D., TMS is the major cause of pain in the back, neck, shoulders, buttocks, and limbs--and it is caused not by structural abnormalities but by the mind's effort to repress emotions. He's not saying that your pain is all in your head; rather, he's saying that the battle going on in your mind results in a real physical disorder that may affect muscles, nerves, tendons, or ligaments. An injury may have triggered the disorder, but is not the cause of the amount or intensity of the resulting pain. According to Sarno, the mind tricks you into not facing repressed emotion by making you focus on pain in the body. When this realization sinks in ("and it must sink in, for mere intellectual appreciation of the process is not enough"), the trick doesn't work any more, and there's no need for the pain. (Healing Back Pain should not be used for self-diagnosis. Always consult a physician for chronic or acute back pain.) --Joan Price

About the Author:

Dr. John E. Sarno is a professor of Clinical Rehabilitation at New York University School of Medicine and attending physician at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Life & Style
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0446557684
• ISBN 13: 9780446557689
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 240