Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection

John E. Sarno

Mar 2001 · Sold by Balance

About this eBook

Dr. John E. Sarno's groundbreaking research on TMS (Tension Myoneural Syndrome) reveals how stress and other psychological factors can cause back pain-and how you can be pain free without drugs, exercise, or surgery.

Dr. Sarno's program has helped thousands of patients find relief from chronic back conditions. In this New York Times bestseller, Dr. Sarno teaches you how to identify stress and other psychological factors that cause back pain and demonstrates how to heal yourself--without drugs, surgery or exercise. Find out:

• Why self-motivated and successful people are prone to Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS)
• How anxiety and repressed anger trigger muscle spasms
• How people condition themselves to accept back pain as inevitable

With case histories and the results of in-depth mind-body research, Dr. Sarno reveals how you can recognize the emotional roots of your TMS and sever the connections between mental and physical pain...and start recovering from back pain today.

Ratings and reviews

This book is full of misinformation and will guide patients in the wrong direction. As I lie in bed with an acute L4/5 disc herniation with subsequent radiculopathy, I am unhappy with the course I must take to remedy. Due to my consequential motor deficits (foot drop) I will likely require surgery. I had an epidural last pm which has helped with pain but is not a permanent fix. I am not surprised that both buttocks have point tenderness as ALL muscles in close proximity participate in the guarding phenomenon. This book for those with disc herniation is the worse information possible. If you have pure muscle pain read on....

Read it years ago when I suffered the worst of back pain due to a herniation in one of my discs. Fast forward 4 years now, I'm almost pain free. I still get back pain during that time of the month, or when I carry heavy stuff, but nothing as serious as it used to be. I almost believed doctors who told me that I wouldn't be able to function as I used to due to my back's "injury" and I even thought I wouldn't be able to walk if I lived my life normally. May god bless Dr. Sarno for this book because it really changed my life to the best, thank good I read it when I needed it the most.

I will start by saying I had an MRI in the summer of 2013. I was told I had herniated discs from L3-L4, L4-L5, L5-S1 and minor spinal stenosis. All the expensive physio and "adjustments" didn't do anything besides temporary relief. This book and Dr. Sarno taught me lessons and gave me knowledge I will cherish for a lifetime. It changed everything for me, also beginning pyschotherapy around the same time as the book was a key factor as well. You'll have to read the book to get why THERAPY is a key factor.

About the author

John Ernest Sarno Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 23, 1923. He attended Kalamazoo College in Michigan for three years before leaving in 1943 to join the Army. During World War II, he worked in field hospitals in Europe. He received a medical degree from Columbia University in 1950 and spent nearly a decade in family practice. He returned to New York in 1960 for a residency in pediatric medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and then another residency at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at New York University. He joined N.Y.U.'s Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine in 1965 and practiced there until his retirement in 2012. He maintained that most instances of non-traumatic chronic pain - including back pain, gastrointestinal disorders, headaches, and fibromyalgia - are physical manifestations of deep-seated psychological anxieties. He wrote several books including Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection; The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain; The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders; Stroke; and Mind Over Back Pain: A Radically New Approach to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Back Pain. He died from cardiac failure on June 22, 2017 at the age of 93.