Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

This New York Times bestseller reveals groundbreaking research on back pain and TMS (Tension Myoneural Syndrome)—and how you can become pain free without drugs, exercise, or surgery.
 
Dr. John E. Sarno's 's program has helped thousands of patients find relief from chronic back conditions. Dr. Sarno teaches you how to identify stress and other psychological factors that cause back pain and demonstrates how to heal yourself—and remain symptom-free. Find out:
 
·Why self-motivated and successful people are prone to Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS)
·How anxiety and repressed anger triggers muscle spasms
·How people condition themselves to accept back pain as inevitable
 
With case histories and the results of in-depth mind-body research, Dr. Sarno reveals how you can recognize the emotional roots of your TMS and sever the connections between mental and physical pain ... and start recovering from back pain today.

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