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Sarnoisms ????

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All1Spirit

USA
149 Posts

Posted - 02/07/2013 : 14:21:49

I have some issues with the paradigm of Sarno’s work. I have been an athlete all my life and I know the dangers of exercising a stiff or tight muscle. When he says the pain is not structural – fine....but working a muscle in autonomic tension is a recipe for real injury.

As a skier I know that a long chair lift ride makes me more prone to injury at the start of a run – so I warm up before hitting the moguls. When I run a race I warm up with walking and light running – why do you think baseball batters warm up in the bull pen.

I have tried to overcome my foot pain with willpower – the result is I am crippled for days afterward. You have to know your body and the degree of autonomic tension you have. An admonition to just get back to the track is short sighted.

Second the paradigm that the pain is a psychodynamic process to distract me does not sit well. This smacks of the 1980’s and early 1990’s belief that you have malevolent parts of yourself that create disease for secondary gain. I can see more truth in Dr. Scott Brady’s work that it is simply the accumulated stress and the stress of repression that creates what was called the anxiety tension state.

Then the medical community had to invent another diagnosis and called it fibromyalgia – new codes and new drugs to sell. And when you tell patients that there is no cure – take the pain medications and learn to live with it you have a customer for life.

I also don’t believe in the oxygen depravation concept. Muscles contract through the conscious voluntary system – raising your hand to open a door or the unconscious involuntary reflex – jerking back from hot stove or a reaction to the threat of mental cognitions or stress.

A muscle that in under constant contraction for any reason produces pain for one reason – STOP!! It is not designed to be in constant contraction and like any pain the message is STOP!! I could go into the metabolites and other biology of pain but the bottom line is it is the bodies dash warning lights telling you there is attention needed....now if we just had a read out of the exact attention it wants and one not wrapped in psychobabble and erudite academia.

chickenbone

Panama
398 Posts

Posted - 02/07/2013 : 18:27:48

All1Spirit, Dr. Sarno does not say that soft tissue or structural issues don't happen. They do and this is often how TMS begins. You get a slight injury which should heal in a fairly short period of time, about 3 months. Then the brain (mind) decides that it will just hang on to the pain. Pain that lasts longer than 3 months after an injury is considered chronic and there is almost no evidence that there is a physiological cause for it. A lot of medical doctors are finally beginning to realize this.

Have you read Dr. James Alexander's book, "The Hidden Psychology of Pain"? This book really does a good job explaining the latest studies on the physiology of pain. Another good book is by an Orthopedic Surgeon names David Hanscom called "Back in Control".

Also, all of the really good books on this subject bring up the idea of iatrogenic disease, that is a bad medical result caused by a treatment that should not have been done in the first place and made the patient much worse. So, as opposed to making up another disease, the TMS idea exposes how doctors are often making us worse. For example, countless numbers of women have developed hysterical pain symptoms as a result of fear of 2 disease totally made up my medical science called "osteoporosis" and "osteopenia".

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