HWN Suggests

America’s most famous back pain doctor said pain is in your head. Thousands think he's right.

Last summer, I published a comprehensive guide to the new science of treating back pain. Immediately my inbox filled with emails about a doctor that readers felt I’d overlooked: the late John Sarno.

“Thousands of people, including myself and my husband, cured our chronic back pain using [Sarno’s] methods,” wrote Karen Karvonen. Another Sarno devotee, Steven Schroeder, said the doctor changed his life. Schroeder’s back pain flared whenever he was stressed — a busy time at work, an illness in his family. After he absorbed Sarno’s books, the discomfort mostly vanished.

“I still sometimes have pain now in times of stress — but I can literally make it go away with mental focus,”…

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  Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) Questionnaire

If you’re still in doubt as to whether or not you’ve got Tension Myositis Syndrome, then I’ve compiled a series of questions that can guide you. My Tension Myositis Syndrome Questionnaire will bring to light situations and factors that make an individual more likely to experience TMS pain, including personality traits that are exhibited by TMS sufferers. But first of all, I always like to stress how important it is to rule out any serious medical conditions, like infection and cancer, if you’ve got persistent and debilitating pain OR if you are experiencing a totally new symptom.

Articles of Interest

An Introduction to Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS)

Have you struggled with chronic pain or another medically unexplained symptom for a long time? Have you tried everything to alleviate your pain, but nothing worked? Have you had doctors tell you they "just can’t find anything wrong?" Then you may have Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). TMS is a condition that causes real physical symptoms that are not due to pathological or structural abnormalities and are not explained by diagnostic tests. In TMS, symptoms are caused by psychological stress.

How I Eliminated my Chronic Pain through a Mind-Body Approach

This is the story of my several year journey with chronic pain in my hands and wrists that originally developed as repetitive strain injuries, or RSI, from guitar and computer use. After trying pretty much everything to find a cure, I gave up for a while and then last year experienced a dramatic and surprising recovery after finally discovering an accurate diagnosis for my pain in what is variously referred to as Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), Mind-Body Syndrome (MBS), and / or Psychophysiologic Disorder (PPD), or physical symptoms of a psychological origin.

Is Tension Myositis Syndrome real at all?

One of my biggest struggles since I healed from TMS has been convincing people that the syndrome is real, to get them to see that I wouldn’t be living the free and active life I’m living right now if it hadn’t been for this discovery and for the fact that I took a very active role in my own recovery. Some believe my TMS story, only to conclude that I must have been a rare mental case, someone who had been ‘bad enough’ to get an unusual psychosomatic disorder.

Resources

Pain Outside the Box

What if you’ve been blaming your chronic pain on the wrong reasons all along, and suddenly, someone not only taught you the truth, but also showed you what to do about it? This is exactly the ambition behind PainOutsideTheBox. If you’ve been suffering from one or more chronic pain symptoms for months or years, and you’ve never found anything to completely relieve it, then you may have hit on the right place! You, like so many others, may simply be suffering from Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), also known as PPD (Psychophysiological Pain), and MindBody Syndrome

TMS RoundTable

Dr Tovah and Rose bring you a weekly Live Broadcast w/ doctors, therapists, individuals educating & sharing information about healing chronic pain, autoimmune dx, medically unexplained symptoms (MUS).

Dr. John Sarno, 93, Dies; Best-Selling Author Tied Pain to Anxieties

Revered by some as a saint and dismissed by others as a quack, Dr. Sarno maintained that most nontraumatic instances of chronic pain — including back pain, gastrointestinal disorders, headaches and fibromyalgia — are physical manifestations of deep-seated psychological anxieties.

Dr. John Stacks

Dr. Stracks runs the only Tension Myositis Syndrome program in Chicago, and he’s treated hundreds of patients for this over the past decade.