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> the pain is real, it's just caused by processes in your brain, I don't find this particular statement very revolutionary. We have known for a long time that

• nateberkopec 8y ago
  I completely agree with you, but our society has such a stigma around mental illness that if you tell someone their back pain is caused by repressed emotions, you get what happens in the article.
  • mikojan 8y ago
    Maybe it's because you're not a doctor
    • ergothus 8y ago
      I felt plenty of resentment and disbelief when a doctor said it. (Not about RSI in my case, but the point that "it's in your head" does not come off well.)
      • kmundnic 8y ago
        I used to feel the same way, until I read Sarno’s book. The way he explained what psychosomatic means completely changed my perspective over it. I think the main problem with many doctors is the fact that the patient tends to feel blamed when told that their minds are causing the problem. This is not Sarno’s approach at all, since he states that chronic pain can be seen as a defense mechanism against deep negative emotions.
  • theli0nheart 8y ago
    > if you tell someone their back pain is caused by repressed emotions, you get what happens in the article. But...you would (or could?, or should?) never tell someone that, because how would you know? Maybe there is some link but to conclude that it could be the case is pretty silly. So it's not like that's a stigma, it's just a statement not based in fact that evokes a strong reaction because you're telling someone why they're feeling a certain way when in reality you have no idea at all.
    • hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
      Yeah, I think the thing a lot of commenters are missing is that the medical field itself has a pretty bad history of telling people "it's all in your head" when there turned out to be specific, treatable biological causes. This is especially true for CFS, where for a long time it was seen not just to be psychosomatic, but actually "not really that bad." As another example, stress was blamed as the main cause of ulcers for decades, when an H pylori infection turned out to be the primary culprit.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • internet_user 8y ago
        There is also HUGE amounts of money involved. Especially huge ramifications come to the fact that you could either have extra 10 billion dollars paid out to CFS claimants, or you could spend them on your pet projects....what would one with power to decide the outcome of that do...? Only the good things, of course, because they are all angels.
      • NikkiA 8y ago
        For most of the '00s and around '10-12, CFS wasn't even seen as a real thing, but purely imaginary.
    • nateberkopec 8y ago
      I used "you" in the wrong way here. You == qualified medical people, such as in the article. Not you == oneself/one.
  • falcor84 8y ago
    Well, repressed emotions is a term that doesn't have any clear physiological meaning and I think that might be the problem. I see a lot of success around the acceptance of the term "stress" which has clear physiological as well as psychological meanings, both for professionals and lay people. Maybe we need more terminology like this.
  • jvagner 8y ago
    honestly and earnestly, i also think a psychological condition that can (in most cases) be adjusted is taking society seriously. without a filter, and in some cases a firewall... "society" can also be the source of chronic pain.
  • internet_user 8y ago
    Oh so you've already made the conclusion its a mental illness? You are the reason why such reactions occur.
• jerf 8y ago
  "I don't find this particular statement very revolutionary." It depends on how you read it, since the short 12-word summary could be read dozens of different ways. There's ways in which trivially, of course, duh, pain is in the brain, where else would it be? But there's also ways in which it stands in stark contrast to what most people implicitly believe. Take your (you, the reader, not kimmy1 specifically) beliefs about the nature of pain, and explicitly hold it up to the concept of phantom limb syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb And make extra sure to read the section about mirror box treatment. (That it works at all, for anyone, is the important point, not whether it's a miracle cure for all sufferers.) You may already have heard about these things, but have you explicitly examined your beliefs about pain to ensure they incorporpate these ideas? I don't know about fibromyalgia, but it wouldn't shock me that much if there is something a lot like phantom limb syndrome out there that confuses us by causing phantom pain in body parts that exist. For eminently rational reasons it would be a long time before we worked out way down to that hypothesis.
  • gumby 8y ago
    > There's ways in which trivially, of course, duh, pain is in the brain, where else would it be? Actually nociceptive pain is by definition not in the brain and is fundamentally somatic. However somehow it is privileged by society: it’s “real” pain while those others are “all in your head”. The sad thing is that the scientist is validating these phenomena yet the critics don’t understand that.
• rcxdude 8y ago
  The point being, that when you are on fire, you feel pain as a consequence of your pain receptors in your body firing in response to tissue damage. Depending on circumstances, You can also feel pain without these receptors firing, and you can also feel no or little pain when these receptors are firing a lot. You can say that the pain originates either from the receptors or from something internally in the brain. Naively you might describe the first type as 'real' and the second as 'imaginary', which is of scant use to downright dismissive of the person actually experiencing said pain.
• everdev 8y ago
  I think the point is that with the common understanding of bodily pain there's usually a physical initiation like a pin prick. OC is saying that the pain can originate in the brain itself without any external force on the body.
• ethbro 8y ago
  It goes a level deeper than that. Learned from dating a very good massage therapist for awhile, our minds relatively commonly cause physical changes that lead to pain symptoms. E.g. you subconsciously favor your back, leading to overexertion of other muscles, leading to physical degradation and pain from those muscles Talking with her was eye opening on the amount of sub-major muscle "stuff" that is constantly subconsciously working in our muscular-skeletal system. "You hold tension in your neck" is a remarkably complex statement (and solution).
  • jayd16 8y ago
    Is that considered psychosomatic, though? I don't think this fits the topic at hand.
    • ethbro 8y ago
      It's a blurry line. If I've caused permanent damage to my back because I've been subconsciously holding it incorrectly for decades, is that damage psychosomatic?
      • hisnameisjimmy 8y ago
        If you go with the Sarno theory though, the damage is very unlikely to be permanent, and any lingering pain is still based in repressed, stressful emotions.
• PaulHoule 8y ago
  That is true about acute pain. It is not true about chronic pain. Acute pain will get better if you rest, chronic pain won't. Most chronic pain sufferers will feel better if they behave as if the pain doesn't exist, increase their activities, get less depressed, feel less pain... The core of fibro identity, however, is that fibros don't experience the benefits of exercise, they get the pain but they don't get the gain. That might be true. I have seen fibros try something new and get hurt even more quickly than heroin adicts.
  • internet_user 8y ago
    That's because most cases of fibro is undiagnosed small fiber neuropathy. Nothing to do with psychology, and everything to do with destruction of peripheral nerve tissue.
• deleted 8y ago
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