WHEN PAIN IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD

The majority of back pain resists any sort of treatment or diagnosis because it's an emotional pain, says Dr John Sarno. Cate Montana investigates

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In February 1991, Warner Books published the unassuming title Healing Back Pain by John E. Sarno, MD (sarnoclinic.com), a professor of rehabilitation medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. An attending physician in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine from 1965 until his retirement in 2012, at first Sarno had no idea his book and seminars about what he labeled “tension myositis syndrome” would change the lives of thousands.

He certainly didn't anticipate hearing from hundreds of readers that years, and sometimes decades, of crippling back and neck pain had miraculously disappeared after they read his book and followed its suggestions. Certainly, this writer didn't anticipate that choosing to read his book and write about this syndrome for WDDTY would result in a 90 percent reduction of crippling pelvic and buttock pain that had resisted every treatment under the sun and had been steadily worsening for the last seven years—a pain reduction that, to date, has taken only six weeks.

It all started in the early 1980s, when Sarno had become increasingly frustrated with treating patients for back pain according to the classical model. To this day, that model views back pain as primarily due to structural abnormalities of the spine, most commonly arthritic or disc disorders, compression of nerves due to poor posture, lack of exercise, etc.

“Over the years I became increasingly troubled with the fact that frequently the pattern of a patient's pain and the findings on physical examination didn't match the presumed pathology,” he writes. “For example, pain might be attributed to degenerative arthritic changes at the lower end of the spine, but the patient might have pain in places that had nothing to do with the bones in that area. Or someone might have a lumbar disc that was herniated to the left and have pain in the right leg.