3 ms·

I had chronic, severe, debilitating pain for years until I read the book: The Mindbody Prescription by Dr. Sarno [1] Someone on HN suggested it in a "carpal tu

• nemo1618 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing. I've recommended Sarno a few times on HN and always wrestle with the guilt of offering unsolicited advice. But I figure if it helps even saves just one or two people from months/years/decades of pain, it's worth it.
• pacomerh 6y ago
  I came here to say this, thanks. Sometimes I hesitate from posting about this because It's a very sensitive topic. The reason for your pain might be totally different from mine and I hate to assume what worked for me would work for you, etc. In any case, I was also changed by reading Sarno's books and that's the interesting part. My pain started in my chest, left and right. Then it transitioned to the center, I went to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack. Got blood tests and studies done. In the following months the pain took over other parts of my body and my arms, legs and back were hurting a lot. I was having a very hard time working, I had to ask for a couple of weeks off and try to figure out what was going on. Sometimes the pain would go away for a few hours and then come back. I didn't have a clue of what was going on because I couldn't find a consistent pattern, it was just moving everywhere and I couldn't even play with my kid, which was killing me. I was browsing YouTube and was reading about this guy that had Carpal Tunnel, I was curious because I was trying to avoid making my pain worse. So when I was reading the comments, I saw someone wrote something like "Read Sarno's book and thank me later". I was intrigued and started reading about him. I started with his book: The Divided Mind. From there it all started to change gradually. I found a local physician that specializes in TMS, and that help me so much. after a few weeks it all started to fade away considerably. Today I feel great. All this happened in a period of like 8 months.
  • monoideism 6y ago
    In your case, I could definitely see the mind-body connection. And even in the case of some carpal tunnel. But I went over some Sarno-related forum, and the mainstream view seems to be that pretty much all chronic neuropathic pain (including all NCV and EMG-confirmed pain) and all chronic musculoskeletal pain (including structural issues on x-ray) are mind-body. And there's a significant nutty minority who seems to think even some cancer and such is mind-body. Also, how does it explain people who have chronic pain, then surgery, then they never experience pain again? I'd like to buy into this, but that just seems vaccine conspiracy level crazy - overly simplistic for most cases to say the least. Maybe I'm wrong. That said, I do strongly believe that your state of mind has a huge impact with how you deal with chronic pain. I know that's true.
• auganov 6y ago
  > Frozen shoulder is almost certainly a manifestation of TMS, at least for some large number of people. For those who understand the mechanism, it's clear that 2020 is going to be a bad year for people in terms of chronic pain. It doesn't need to be. I like Dr. Sarno's work but his thinking around TMS is IMO the weakest part. The main insight is really just the fact that a lot of pain doesn't reliably map to any physical conditions. Beyond that we don't know too much. We can infer the brain is involved but not necessarily how. Dr. Sarno takes a psychoanalytic approach focusing on repressed emotions and so forth. But one can come up with many other explanations. One's ideas about pain itself may be a factor. If deep seated psychological problems were to blame it wouldn't explain how so many people get tremendous relief by simply reading the book.