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Healing Back Pain | 
 enlarge | Author: John Sarno
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
Buy New: £4.46
You Save: £8.53 (66%)
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Rating:  70 reviews
Sales Rank: 8477
Media: Paperback
Pages: 208
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.6
ISBN: 0446392308
Dewey Decimal Number: 617.564
EAN: 9780446392303
ASIN: 0446392308
Publication Date: February 1, 1991
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: New book. WE USE PRIORITY AIRMAIL ONLY for books from the USA. UK & European delivery is 7-10 days. Over 2,000,000 books sold to Amazon customers
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Amazon.co.uk Review
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 65 more reviews...
 This book changed my life! January 7, 2009
Mr. Paul L. Smith (Leicester, UK)
In 2007 I suffered for months with a pinched sciatic nerve in my lower back. It took me over a minute just to get out of the car and straighten up.I couldn't sit at my desk for more than a few minutes and I stood up for most meetings. I spent a fortune with chiropractors but all they could do was give relief that lasted a short time.
And then a guy I worked with gave me this book written by an American GP, Dr. John Sarno M.D. called Healing Back pain. And it changed my life. Because at that point I had suffered all sorts of back, neck, shoulder and arm problems going back years.
What Doctor Sarno's book details astounded me. He asks what possible cause could there be for an explosion of patients coming into his local practice complaining of these back related problems - has the human race suddenly developed a weakness after thousands of years of evolution?
Then he started thinking back to the 60's and 70's and the explosion then in gastric ulcers and how they had largely gone away now.
He also noticed that back sufferers had also previously suffered headaches, frozen shoulders, acute heartburn, depression, dizziness, asthma, eczema, hiatus hernia, peptic ulcers and other similar complaints.
He concludes that there is a very strong mind-body connection and that getting pains in these places is "normal" and they will dissipate in time but that the pain (which is real) is a manifestation of you dealing with stress in one way or another. He believes that the ulcers he saw in the 60's were now being replaced by back related problems in the 90's and the statistics seemed to prove that.
Since I read the book, it has truly changed my life. I still get back problems and twinges but I now tell myself that I know whats causing it and that its my body's way of dealing with the crap of life we sometimes have to deal with. As a result, I have been free of such pain for the longest period in my life. It cannot be coincidence. However, it won't help genuine injuries to the back, it's sciatic nerve and muscular pain problems that mysteriously develop without apparent cause where the book helps most. And you either "get" this book or you don't - as you can tell from the other reviews here. It seems to be an attitude of mind as much as anything else that counts. And it worked for me.
Worth a look. September 29, 2008
2bluesky2
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
I think this book will be most helpful for people who have been suffering with back pain for a long period of time (months to years). Most back pain lasts only a short time, and if it persists, you probably either have a really serious medical problem (that is usually obvious) or there are psychological factors involved.
If you've been through the conventional medical system with your back pain for a long time with no satisfaction, have had many physical treatments (such as heat, massage, manipulation, etc.) with no relief, AND have had serious back pain issues ruled out, then I say it would be well worth your while to at least check out this book. While there are true physical causes of back pain that are not psychological, this book will make you think about any stress related issues that could be a part of your pain. Other self-help books I liked include The 5-Minute Plantar Fasciitis Solution. Good luck!
 Interesting but no help whatsoever June 17, 2008
D. Newark (Croatia)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an interesting read but no help at all. It is like going to a doctor with a back pain only to be told that there is a cure but they are not going to tell you what it is. OK I accept that my neck pain is caused caused by my brain not being able to face up to something else and all I have to do tell myself there is nothing physically wrong and ignore my neck pain. Well I have tried that guess what ... it didn't work. Now what ?????? Seems to me this book is nothing more than a brochure for the author's private clinic.
Incidentaly this idea is nothing new. My 88 year old father told them that in the second world war he was told by a psychiatrist that 90% of all pain comes from the mind.
didn't work for me February 6, 2008
a reader
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I thought I would share my experience given that when I read the reviews I thought this book would be a great cure-all. I started to suffer from back problems two years ago which as any back sufferer will know completely disrupted my life. You name the treatment I have had it so I was really at the end of my tether when I bought this book. Unfortunately mind over matter when you are in pain only works up to a point. The reality is and Sarno sets it out in his book that most people working in the back pain industry don't understand why some people with serious spinal problems showing up on MRI, x-ray etc have little or no pain and others with relatively little spinal degeneration have severe pain. I am one of the latter people. Sarno advises that back pain is predominantly due to myalgic tension in the back and he uses the variations in people's pain thresholds relative to their level of spinal degeneration as a premise for advising patients that back pain is all in the mind and is the body's way of coping with an unacknowledged psychological problem. Once the psychological problem is acknowledged, the pain should, he posits, go away. Well I have as many psychological problems as the next person but telling myself that did not work for me. The reality is that the huge rise in back problems over the last 50 years or so is due to the increasingly sedentary lives people lead with longer hours spent in cars, in front of computers etc. Jasper Gerrard wrote in the Telegraph two days ago about the hugh rise in back pain syndrome in Africa which hitherto hadn't existed due to the increased employment of the populace in desk bound jobs. It is also a reality that most pain specialists don't know why there is such hugh variations in pain between people with similar back complaints. You really have to persevere with treatments, exercises etc until you find out what works for you. In my own case, after two years of attending nearly every specialist available at great cost and having received varying diagnoses including the appallingly amorphous one of fibromyalgia I have finally discovered what works for me which is low impact aerobic exercise. I do hill walking which is not too taxing on my joints but gets blood into the affected areas - this nourishes them and decreases the pain. When a hill is not available I use a treadmill. I also use pilates but the trick is not to persevere with an exercise that you find painful EVEN if your physiotherapist recommends it. If you have back problems you should think twice before taking an step or yoga class. Some yoga movements involve extreme stretching of the spine which can excerbate a back problem. Similarly if have a back injury hopping up and down on the step box and doing militaristic exercises along with people who are young and fit can make your back worse. I found it easier to exercise on my own. You have to listen to your own body at the end of the day. The reality is that we were not designed to be sedentary and as you get older for some people back problems are inevitable unless you keep your back fit. Unfortunately mind over matter did not work for me.
Healing Pain - A mystery September 6, 2007
Martin Tierney
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
The first review makes a fair number of points regarding the apparent arrogance and lack of 'how to' advice. That cannot be denied. I read this ten years ago during a particularly painful time and stressful job and was calling for Sarno to give more detail. I had suffered back pain for 9 years, the last 2 of those dominated by sciatica, and I thought it was mumbo jumbo but having tried every therapist: Chiro; osteo; sacro-cranium and some more besides, I felt I had nothing to lose and gave it a go. Literally 6 weeks later - I kid you not- the sciatica was gone. The back pain was gone. These conditions have NEVER returned. It's still something of a mystery to me.
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