Healing Back Pain

Dr John E. Sarno is a professor of Clinical Rehabilitation Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and attending physician at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Centre.

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, that the battle going on in your mind results in a real physical disorder, which 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 realisation 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 BackPain should not be used for self-diagnosis. Always consult a physician for chronic or acute back pain). - Joan Price, AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW