Back Pain Is A State Of Mind

This is the first of a 2-part interview. Medscape: I think our readers would be interested in starting off with how you first became interested in back pain. What triggered your interest? Dr. Sarno: I became interested in back pain when I came to the Rusk Institute here at the New York University Medical Center as head of the outpatient department. I was exposed for the first time in my medical career to large numbers of people with back pain. To make a long story short, after a few years of making the conventional diagnosis and administering the conventional treatments, I came to the conclusion that there was something terribly wrong, because my results were as poor as everybody else's. I found this frustrating and decided I'd better take a closer look at this and really question the diagnosis. Medscape: In your opinion, what was wrong with the diagnoses of back pain? What did you find? Dr. Sarno: When I started to look into it, I found that large numbers of people in whom the pain was being attributed to some structural abnormality actually had a totally different disorder. It was a disorder in which the pain was very real, but it was initiated by emotional factors. Medscape: Emotional factors such as...? Dr. Sarno: It primarily had to do with the stresses in patients' lives and, interestingly enough, the stresses that they put on themselves. Once I began to make this diagnosis and to deal with it accordingly, for the first time I began to have success. And of course that's why I started to write books about this. But here in the United States virtually no one in the medical profession is willing to consider this diagnosis. That's, incidentally, very, very important. I do not have an approach to dealing with pain but rather the stresses that cause it. Medscape: Are the stresses that lead to back pain, as you say, very common? Dr. Sarno: It is more than back pain. What we can refer to as stress-related disorders have turned out to be more widespread: It's low back, upper back and neck; it's pain involving the knees, pain involving the feet. >From what I understand from an article in the New York Times, there were 10 million people in the United States with foot pain, which is an epidemic. And all of these pain syndromes have spread in epidemic fashion in the United States over the last 30 years -- precisely because they are mind/body disorders that have been incorrectly diagnosed, and therefore, as far as I'm concerned, incorrectly treated. I want to make that clear: The major factor is not what treatment one employs but what diagnosis one makes. http://www.rense.com/general75/backpain.htm

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