Back Pain Or Other Unexplaine Pain? Listen To Your Brain

By Author: Werner L. Knoepp PhD
Total Articles: 4762
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Back pain is high on the list of a disturbing number of puzzling and perceived incurable health disorders. Eighty percent of Americans have a history of some kind of painful condition involving this ubiquitous medical disorder whose cause has been attributed to a variety of structural malformations in the physical anatomy of the patient. Conventional medical thought on the subject has changed little over the past fifty years and it may be hard to accept, but our highly sophisticated conventional medical community seems to be shooting way off target when dealing with this issue.

Pain in the back, neck, shoulder, or buttock are conventionally attributed to poor posture, overexertion, under exercise, and some other vague and undefined conditions which are believed to misalign spine or bones.. Pain in the legs and arms is presumed to be due to compression; pinching of nerves against bone. Degenerative arthritis or a herniated lumbar disk are also often named as the culprits. Treatment for these conditions normally includes injections, deep heat in the form of ultrasound, massage, exercise, and in extreme cases, surgery.. ...
... Nobody knows what these therapies are supposed to do, but in some cases, they seem to help. There is a problem with all these assumptions that stands out bright and clear when all the theorizing is cut away to reveal that the primary tissue involved with all these disorders is muscle, and this has absolutely nothing to do with bone structure or pinched nerves.

Back in 1965, Dr John E. Sarno joined the staff of what is now the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center. It was his first introduction to large numbers of patients with back, neck, shoulder, and buttock pain. He was perplexed by the magnitude of it. Equally perplexing to Dr Sarno was the rationale for the conventionally prescribed treatment. No one could tell him what those treatments were supposed to do or what outcomes to expect. There was some tepid and unconvincing rationalization going around that proposed exercise as strengthening abdominal and back muscles, thus supporting the spine and preventing pain.

This idea failed to correlate with the logic that kept insinuating itself on Dr Sarno's mind. Treating patients in the prescribed conventional ways was frustrating. unproductive, and rarely if ever correlated with the presumed reason for the pain. For instance, pain might be attributed to degenerative arthritic changes at the .lower end of the spine, but the patient would have pain in places that had nothing to do with the bones in that area. Or a lumbar disk might be herniated to the left, but the patient would have pain in the right leg.

Over time, Dr Sarno began fixating on the observation that 88 percent of patients had histories of tension or migraine headaches. Prominent also in the histories were heartburn, hiatus hernia, ulcers, colitis, spastic colon, irritable bowel syndrome, hay fever, asthma, and other disorders, all of which were strongly suspected of being caused by tension.

Putting that theory to the test, and treating patients accordingly, pretty much justified Dr Sarno's conclusions. Patients showed remarkable improvements in treatment results. leading him to quoin the term Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). (Myo means muscle).

To this day, the conventional medical community has shown little interest in Dr Sarno's approach or in TMS. Alternative physicians on the other hand have embraced his mind-body connection to unexplained pain and are successfully treating patients with astonishing success. Even though Dr Sarno himself will emphasize that his TMS diagnosis is simply hypothetical, the successes of those who use this approach are undeniable. So if you suffer from unexplained back pain, try talking to your brain about it. First, forget the rationalization that you got injured picking up your daughter, or you threw your back out on your honeymoon, or you had that minor accident which caused the problem Get to an alternative physician; a bona fide holistic practitioner experienced in dealing with these disorders and watch your problems melt away.

An excellent system anyone can use himself is Roy Palmer's Seven Seconds To Pain Relief A system for dealing with all manner of pain, and short of getting to an alternative physician, this is probably the best advice you will ever get for dealing with pain. Much of Dr Sarno's thoughts on pain management are cleverly hidden in this system so that no one will begin to feel overwhelmed by any need to concentrate. Learn more here
About Author:
Werner L. Knoepp Ph D is a retired Astrophysicist/Aerospace Engineer with specialties in Space Life Support Systems. Currently Director of Research and Product Evaluation with LeQuadrillage.com, a Health