I thought I addressed that in Section 4. Did you miss that? Or are you asking me to spell out all the details? If the latter, sorry, I don’t want to spend my time doing that, and might not do a good job anyway.
Probably it’s just me, but even after rereading Section 4 I have absolutely zero clue what Sarno’s treatment consists of. I wasn’t looking for all the details, just one sentence would have been nice?
First paragraph of section 4. The extremely-minimalist description would be: “Stop believing in the orthodox model, stop worrying, feel and act as if you’re healthy, and then the pain goes away”. (The idea is to break the vicious cycle at the “step (1)” part, in terms of the Section 2.1 bulleted list.) Maybe you were expecting something more than that?
Of course, that’s much easier said than done. So reading the books / testimonials / other resources is good for both gaining the needed confidence, and learning various helpful mental tips and tricks. I guess John Sarno gives his in-person patients some kind of therapy / counseling / something, but I don’t remember exactly what that entails, and I personally didn’t need anything like that myself.
The extremely-minimalist description would be: “Stop believing in the orthodox model, stop worrying, feel and act as if you’re healthy, and then the pain goes away”.
IDK if this will be important to you, but I’d like to thank you for this comment, as it relieved my back pain after 8 years! Thank you @p.b. for asking for clarification and not giving up after first response. Thank you @Steven Byrens for writing the article and taking time to respond.
8 fucking years..
I’ve read this article and comments a month ago. Immediately after reading it the pain was gone. (I never had mystical experiences, like enlightenment, so the closest thing I can compare it to personally, was the “perspectival shift” I’ve felt ten years ago when “the map is not the territory” finally clicked)
I know—it could’ve been “just a placebo effect”—but as the author argues, who cares, and that’s kinda the main point of the claim. Still, I was afraid of giving myself a false hope—there were several few days long remissions of pain scattered along these 8 years, but the pain always returned—this is why I gave myself and this method a month before writing this comment. So far it works!
I know—“Post hoc ergo propter hoc” is not the best heuristic—there could be other explanations of my pain relief. For example a week or two before reading this article I’ve started following this exercise routine daily. However, I’ve paused the routine for three days before reading your article, and the pain relief happened exactly when I’ve finished reading your comment, so IMO timing and rarity (8 years...) of the event really suggests this comment is what helped. I still do the exercise routine, and it surely contributes and helps, too. Yet, I do the routine just once in the morning, yet I consciously feel how whenever throughout the day the pain starts to raise its head again, I can do a mental move inspired by this article to restore calm and dissolve the pain.
Also this is definitely how it felt from the inside! In the hope that it will help somebody else alleviate their pain here are some specific patterns of thoughts induced by this article I found helpful:
“oh, so my pain-center is simply confused about the signals, it is screaming like a child who can’t express well what’s wrong, and I was overreacting. I should show it love, not anger, I should calm it down, I must be the adult in the room and figure out what’s the real problem here.”
“I should ignore the pain by gently putting the pain to the side (like you do to the thoughts during meditation) as opposed to fighting through it. Like hitting snooze, vs clenching my jaw and fist to overcome it.”
“yeah, I’ve heard you pain-center, but I think you are mistaken about the magnitude and source of the problem, and I am actively working on the solution to the real problem, so please do not distract me while I am helping you”
“the pain-center is presenting me a whole crayon-drawn image of a tiger, but it was just connecting-the-dots creatively, and there really was no tiger, just the dots”. I think this one is most helpful metaphor for me. I can feel how I dissolve a full certainty of “the pain of the whole upper back” into individual, small, shaky dots of unsure signals from small patches of the back.
“looks like it was just one small place around this shoulder blade which started the alarm, maybe I should just change the position of right arm, oh, yes, this brought relief, good”
“ok, so this part near neck is so tense it started complaining, and this was probably because I was trying too hard to finish answering this email before visiting the restroom—let’s just give myself a pause and treat the body more gently”.
“ok, I need to be more precise: which patch of my back is in pain right now? If I can’t tell, then perhaps it’s something in the environment that is causing stress, or some thought, or some anticipation, or maybe some physiological need? Let’s look around and find out what this alarm is about”
The Bohr’s horseshoe: “I was told that it works even if you don’t believe in it”
I just imagine a volume knob on the pain and just turn it down
I am really excited about all this positive change in my mind, because as one can imagine (and if you can’t, recall main character of House M.D.) a constant pain corrupts other parts of your mind and life. It’s like a prior to interpret every sentence of family-members and every event in life. It’s a crony belief, a self-sustaining “bitch eating cracker syndrome”. It took 8 years to build this thought-cancer, and it will probably take some time to disband it, but I see the progress already.
Also, I am “counter-factually frightened” by how close I was to completely missing this solution to my problem. I was actively seeking, you see, fruitlessly, though, for years! I had so much luck: to start reading LW long ago; to subscribe Scott Alexander’s blog (I even read his original review of “unlearn your pain” from 2016 yet it sounded negative and (I) concentrated too much on discrediting the underlying model of action, so perhaps I could fix my pain 6 years earlier); to develop a habit of reading LW and searching for interesting things and reading comments, not just the article.. Thank you again for this article and this comment thread. When I imagine how sad would be the future if on that afternoon I didn’t read it I want to cry...
Thank you for sharing! As of this morning I was telling myself that I’ve developed RSI in both arms over the last week –but I’m now reconsidering that belief ;)
The most helpful thing my physiotherapist did when he treated me for chronic back trouble: making the observation that there was a considerable amount of avoidance behavior on my part. Stopping that and becoming more active has greatly reduced my back problems.
So what is the treatment?
I thought I addressed that in Section 4. Did you miss that? Or are you asking me to spell out all the details? If the latter, sorry, I don’t want to spend my time doing that, and might not do a good job anyway.
Probably it’s just me, but even after rereading Section 4 I have absolutely zero clue what Sarno’s treatment consists of. I wasn’t looking for all the details, just one sentence would have been nice?
First paragraph of section 4. The extremely-minimalist description would be: “Stop believing in the orthodox model, stop worrying, feel and act as if you’re healthy, and then the pain goes away”. (The idea is to break the vicious cycle at the “step (1)” part, in terms of the Section 2.1 bulleted list.) Maybe you were expecting something more than that?
Of course, that’s much easier said than done. So reading the books / testimonials / other resources is good for both gaining the needed confidence, and learning various helpful mental tips and tricks. I guess John Sarno gives his in-person patients some kind of therapy / counseling / something, but I don’t remember exactly what that entails, and I personally didn’t need anything like that myself.
IDK if this will be important to you, but I’d like to thank you for this comment, as it relieved my back pain after 8 years! Thank you @p.b. for asking for clarification and not giving up after first response. Thank you @Steven Byrens for writing the article and taking time to respond.
8 fucking years..
I’ve read this article and comments a month ago. Immediately after reading it the pain was gone. (I never had mystical experiences, like enlightenment, so the closest thing I can compare it to personally, was the “perspectival shift” I’ve felt ten years ago when “the map is not the territory” finally clicked)
I know—it could’ve been “just a placebo effect”—but as the author argues, who cares, and that’s kinda the main point of the claim. Still, I was afraid of giving myself a false hope—there were several few days long remissions of pain scattered along these 8 years, but the pain always returned—this is why I gave myself and this method a month before writing this comment. So far it works!
I know—“Post hoc ergo propter hoc” is not the best heuristic—there could be other explanations of my pain relief. For example a week or two before reading this article I’ve started following this exercise routine daily. However, I’ve paused the routine for three days before reading your article, and the pain relief happened exactly when I’ve finished reading your comment, so IMO timing and rarity (8 years...) of the event really suggests this comment is what helped. I still do the exercise routine, and it surely contributes and helps, too. Yet, I do the routine just once in the morning, yet I consciously feel how whenever throughout the day the pain starts to raise its head again, I can do a mental move inspired by this article to restore calm and dissolve the pain.
Also this is definitely how it felt from the inside! In the hope that it will help somebody else alleviate their pain here are some specific patterns of thoughts induced by this article I found helpful:
“oh, so my pain-center is simply confused about the signals, it is screaming like a child who can’t express well what’s wrong, and I was overreacting. I should show it love, not anger, I should calm it down, I must be the adult in the room and figure out what’s the real problem here.”
“I should ignore the pain by gently putting the pain to the side (like you do to the thoughts during meditation) as opposed to fighting through it. Like hitting snooze, vs clenching my jaw and fist to overcome it.”
“yeah, I’ve heard you pain-center, but I think you are mistaken about the magnitude and source of the problem, and I am actively working on the solution to the real problem, so please do not distract me while I am helping you”
“the pain-center is presenting me a whole crayon-drawn image of a tiger, but it was just connecting-the-dots creatively, and there really was no tiger, just the dots”. I think this one is most helpful metaphor for me. I can feel how I dissolve a full certainty of “the pain of the whole upper back” into individual, small, shaky dots of unsure signals from small patches of the back.
“looks like it was just one small place around this shoulder blade which started the alarm, maybe I should just change the position of right arm, oh, yes, this brought relief, good”
“ok, so this part near neck is so tense it started complaining, and this was probably because I was trying too hard to finish answering this email before visiting the restroom—let’s just give myself a pause and treat the body more gently”.
“ok, I need to be more precise: which patch of my back is in pain right now? If I can’t tell, then perhaps it’s something in the environment that is causing stress, or some thought, or some anticipation, or maybe some physiological need? Let’s look around and find out what this alarm is about”
The Bohr’s horseshoe: “I was told that it works even if you don’t believe in it”
I just imagine a volume knob on the pain and just turn it down
I am really excited about all this positive change in my mind, because as one can imagine (and if you can’t, recall main character of House M.D.) a constant pain corrupts other parts of your mind and life. It’s like a prior to interpret every sentence of family-members and every event in life. It’s a crony belief, a self-sustaining “bitch eating cracker syndrome”. It took 8 years to build this thought-cancer, and it will probably take some time to disband it, but I see the progress already.
Also, I am “counter-factually frightened” by how close I was to completely missing this solution to my problem. I was actively seeking, you see, fruitlessly, though, for years! I had so much luck: to start reading LW long ago; to subscribe Scott Alexander’s blog (I even read his original review of “unlearn your pain” from 2016 yet it sounded negative and (I) concentrated too much on discrediting the underlying model of action, so perhaps I could fix my pain 6 years earlier); to develop a habit of reading LW and searching for interesting things and reading comments, not just the article.. Thank you again for this article and this comment thread. When I imagine how sad would be the future if on that afternoon I didn’t read it I want to cry...
oh wow, this is super helpful to me! thank you for bumping the post with useful insight!
Thanks for sharing, that made my day!!! :)
Thank you for sharing! As of this morning I was telling myself that I’ve developed RSI in both arms over the last week –but I’m now reconsidering that belief ;)
That’s really cool, thanks for sharing!
The most helpful thing my physiotherapist did when he treated me for chronic back trouble: making the observation that there was a considerable amount of avoidance behavior on my part. Stopping that and becoming more active has greatly reduced my back problems.
Yeah, I thought that was just what you did. I expected Sarno to have some kind of program. But ok, if that’s it, that’s it.