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Healing Back Pain | 
 enlarge | Author: John Sarno
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
Buy New: £3.32
You Save: £9.67 (74%)
New (37) Used (13) from £1.47
Rating:  69 reviews
Sales Rank: 30953
Media: Paperback
Pages: 208
Number Of Discs: 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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| Editorial Reviews:
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 64 more reviews...
 Interesting but no help whatsoever June 17, 2008
D. Newark (Croatia)
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
3 out of 3 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
2 out of 2 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.
Very very limited August 11, 2007
Kaitlin (UK)
First I am a great believer in the mind body connection. Over the years I've found various physical problems had their root in my emotional state, so I'll give it two stars for the fact that if emotions are the cause of your pain emotional release will almost certainly fix it.
He takes it for granted that everyone reading this book is in the emotional cause category, and a lot of what he says is both ignorant and supremely arrogant. I find it hard to have any respect for a man who a) states that all injuries heal within six weeks no matter what and b)that the body doesn't suffer pain from physical damage in the spine.
He also states that no help from osteopathy, chiropractitioners, acupuncture, physiotherapy or exercise is ever worthwhile, useful or lasting. Any intervention that seems to work is in fact a placebo, regardless of how the pain started or its cause. If you believe this as well maybe you will find the book helpful.
I wanted this book to be able to help my agonising pain months after a severe accident, or at least be useful somehow - but his reason for pain lasting was that then you could sue someone. Maybe in some cases but not mine. I didn't like it as you may have guessed, but my main reason for not doing so wasn't his ridiculous observations - there were plenty of them - but the lack of any real help of any kind. His book consists almost entirely of his case histories where he describes the character and suppressions of his clients in detail and then says that after hearing his advice they were healed within a month.
The actual advice is that we all have a well of rage within us and that it is the well of rage that causes all our pain, once we accept this our pain is gone. We don't have to heal the rage, just acknowledge it.
What about those who do accept the well of rage already, who are in touch with their weaknesses, failings, frustrations etc and have already experienced therapy for their minds/emotions? A good question, and one that isn't so much as mentioned in this book. But to me his greatest failing, and - given his blithe 'Do everything and ignore the pain' advice - his most dangerous one, is that nowhere does he acknowledge that there may be times when the damage isn't just in the mind but has real and unignorable physical causes. John Sarno is a perfect example of the old adage 'To a hammer everything looks like a nail'
This book has changed my life - not kidding June 29, 2007
ALJ (UK)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I suffered from sciatica in my leg since I was a child. I also had pain in my hand, arm and neck. I saw every specialist under the sun and nothing helped. I eventually had a thorough CAT scan which revealed nothing. And the pain continued. It was so bad that sometimes I couldn't sit down or sleep properly. I took up to 8 painkillers a day.
The reader's comments about this book intreagued me. I am a scientist and don't believe in airy fairy remedies. But this book is not about that. It's really about discovering what impact our mind can have on our body. Within a couple of months my back pain etc was no longer an issue. I no longer feel like a cripple. I do any sport I want and I sleep in any position I like. Sure, I get some pain from time to time, but I know how to manage it and it never gets out of control. I totally recommend this book to anybody who has pain (even other than back pain) and no answers or coping mechanisms.
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