FredAmir

The following is a summary of my story based on my book Rapid Recovery from Back and Neck Pain: A Proven Nine-Step Recovery Plan.

You can say I am an accidental author. My inspiration for writing came from decisively overcoming 25 months of disabling back pain and more.

It all began with a simple case of back pain. Over time, due to improper diagnoses and inappropriate treatments, I developed pain in my neck, shoulder, elbows, and knees, as well as pain and numbness in my arms, hands, and legs. I suffered from gastritis due to my use of prescription and over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications. I was constantly in pain and became severely disabled. At one point the pain was so severe that I was not able to sit or stand for more than fifteen minutes at a time, climb three steps, walk farther than one hundred yards, carry more than four pounds, lift a milk container, or even write two lines. The most emotionally painful part was that I couldn’t allow my young children to get close to me.

My life became limited in ways that I had never imagined. I could not work and was faced with serious questions about my career, my future, and my life, especially as a husband and father. All this—and I was only thirty.

I was seen by general practitioners as well as back specialists and even a nationally known orthopedic surgeon. Each one had his own diagnosis. Osteoarthritis of the spine degenerated discs, sprained back muscles, a pinched nerve, herniated discs, leaky discs, and piriformis syndrome were the various diagnoses for my back and leg pain. I was prescribed a wide variety of different medications and treatments, some of which caused even more pain and disability.

Questions, Questions

Early in this painful and frustrating ordeal, I discovered that the medical professionals themselves were baffled by back pain. Not only did they have difficulty making an accurate diagnosis or prescribing effective treatment, but they also were incapable of providing satisfactory answers to my simplest questions about back pain:

• Why are the majority of people with back pain or chronic pain younger than fifty?

• Why, unlike a broken bone, does back pain not heal, instead, often lasting for years?

• If weak muscles are the cause of back pain, how strong do back muscles have to be for a patient to recover? Do we all need to become bodybuilders to be free of pain?

• If improper sitting and bending can damage the back, why don’t gymnasts and other athletes who put tremendous pressure on their spines suffer from debilitating back pain?

To these and many other questions, I was met with unconvincing responses, shrugged shoulders, or simply, “Well, that’s how back pain is!” In the face of the medical community’s apparent ineptitude in treating back pain—and the fact that some of the treatments prescribed for me actually made my condition worse—I realized that I could no longer afford to be a passive patient.

Search for Answers

I began to take an active role in my diagnosis and treatment, searching the available literature for a cure to my disabling condition—a condition so prevalent that it has become a national health problem. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of treatments for hand, neck, and back pain is disappointing.

• “Surgery has been found to be helpful in only 1 in 100 cases of patients with low back pain. In some people, surgery can even cause more problems.” The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research of the US Department of Health and Human Services reached this conclusion after conducting a comprehensive study of more than 10,000 cases of back pain.

• “Injecting methylprednisolone acetate [cortisone] into the facet joints is of little value in the treatment of patients with chronic low back pain.” This was the conclusion of three studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine.

• “Treatments [for whiplash-associated disorders] evaluated in a rigorous manner show little or no evidence of efficacy.” This was the finding of an exhaustive study conducted at McGill University. Researchers found treatments ranging from a neck collar to traction to be of little or no value.

• “Correcting carpal tunnel syndrome is one of the most common operations performed today. The only problem is, it often doesn’t work,” concluded researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

• “Up to 85% of back pain cannot be given a definitive diagnosis.” This was the determination reached by one of the foremost authorities on the subject, Richard Deyo, MD.

Even though these facts have appeared in some of the most authoritative and prestigious medical journals, you will not learn this crucial information from those who treat back pain, inside or outside the medical profession. Indeed, these treatments are used so widely that you might be shocked to learn that they don’t work in the majority of cases!

The more I perused medical journals and scientific literature, the more I came across such studies. I realized that what is really needed is an accurate diagnosis. Lack of a correct diagnosis is the number one reason why this condition has become a major health problem. As mentioned earlier, as many as 85 percent of patients with low back pain never receive a definitive diagnosis. Without a definitive diagnosis, a cure cannot be expected. Once the diagnosis is correct, the solution can be quite simple!

Finally, an Answer

After months of searching and reading, the answer to my questions came in the mail. Yes, in the mail!

That’s how I learned about the work of John Sarno, MD, a professor of rehabilitative medicine at New York University. He too had been disappointed with the failure of common treatments and had realized the need for a new understanding.

When he looked deep into the medical histories of his patients, Dr. Sarno discovered that 88 percent of his patients had histories of disorders that often have a psychosomatic component, such as migraine headaches, colitis, stomach ulcers, hay fever, asthma, or eczema. These disorders are strongly suspected of being caused by chronic repressed anger, anxiety, worry, or frustration due to stress or tension. Dr. Sarno wondered whether, in the same way that chronic anger, anxiety, worry, or frustration can cause physiological changes leading to these disorders, back pain could also be a physical manifestation of negative emotions.

So he put this new diagnosis to work and began treating his patients accordingly. At first most of his patients felt there was not enough stress or tension in their lives to cause their pain. Many of them believed that they were handling their teenage children, problems at work, and marital problems effectively. They didn’t realize that these difficult situations were creating a great deal of anger, anxiety, worry, or frustration, causing pain in various parts of their bodies.

Dr. Sarno named this diagnosis tension myositis syndrome (TMS). Once he treated back patients for this new diagnosis and not for some structural abnormality, his patients began to recover. In fact, 98 percent of his patients with confirmed cases of herniated discs recovered without surgery—certainly a much better result than the 1 percent success rate experienced with surgery.

Not Me!

What was my reaction to intense negative emotions causing all my pain and severe disability? Not me! Being a calm, positive person who rarely gets angry, I was skeptical about whether Dr. Sarno’s findings applied to me. It is well known that stress and tension can aggravate back pain and many other disorders. But could stress and tension be the actual cause of pain and disability? I figured I had nothing to lose by keeping an open mind and learning more. At the very least, maybe what I learned could help someone else.

As I learned more about Dr. Sarno’s explanation of the pattern of pain and why the pain moves around and becomes chronic, I found convincing answers to all my questions and more. I began to see why so many people between the ages of twenty-five and fifty, facing career and family responsibilities, suffer from chronic pain; why, unlike a broken bone that heals, back pain can become chronic and last for years; why we do not see an epidemic of disabling back and leg pain among Olympic and professional athletes who put tremendous pressure on their spines; and why, because the mind/body connection is so often neglected, the causes of as much as 85 percent of back pain remain unclear. Dr. Sarno’s explanation makes it obvious why surgery and most treatments directed at correcting “spinal abnormalities” fail to help most people.

My Rapid Recovery

With this new understanding, I combined his treatment program with my knowledge of psychology and many years of personal experience with the workings of the mind to design an effective recovery plan, which I later dubbed the Nine-Step Recovery Plan. This plan enabled me to begin my journey to a pain-free and able life immediately. Employing techniques used by Olympic athletes and high achievers, such as visualization and goal setting, I began to create a massive amount of positive emotions, such as joy, excitement, and enthusiasm, and reverse the physiological changes that caused chronic pain.

My improvements could be seen daily and astonished those who knew how disabled I had been. Within the first hours, I was able to sit, stand, bend, and sleep comfortably. The next day I was able to walk without a limp and go shopping at the mall. The climax of my recovery was when, less than two weeks later, I was able to carry both of my children, each weighing more than forty pounds. This I had not been able to do for more than two years due to pain in my arms, back, knees, and legs. It felt wonderful. And in four weeks, I began taking karate lessons.

But there was more. I had suffered from hay fever for seventeen years and had taken antihistamines to control my sneezing and itchy, watery eyes. But with my new understanding that hay fever is one of the many disorders caused by tension, by using the strategies in the Nine-Step Recovery Plan I was able to eliminate it quickly—same was the case with my gastritis and heart murmur. They went away as well.

Then, during a routine eye exam, the ophthalmologist told me that my eyes were fine and I no longer needed the reading glasses I had been wearing for the past fourteen years! I was so surprised that I sought a second opinion. The second ophthalmologist confirmed the diagnosis. I discovered that tension plays a key role here too. In fact, decades ago noted ophthalmologist William Bates recognized the relationship between tension and nearsightedness and other changes in eye refraction. He designed a program for reversing the effects of tension on the eyes, thus eliminating the need for glasses.

Needless to say, at times I was amazed and overwhelmed by these improvements in my health in such a short time. I was also so excited about my discovery that I began sharing it with everyone I knew—and they too recovered rapidly!

Reaching out!

In order to reach more people, I taught seminars and workshops and explained my proven system in my book Rapid Recovery from Back and Neck Pain: A Proven Nine-Step Recovery Plan. By the grace of God, I have received emails from readers around the world who have recovered rapidly by reading my story and applying my plan. To read their stories, please visit http://www.fredamir.com/testimonials.

So what were the causes of anger and tension in my life, which were the real causes of my pain? They had to do with my marriage and my parents. They were nothing out of the ordinary. We all experience problems and tensions in our relationships with our parents, spouses, children, friends, and co-workers; what is important is to realize the limitations in our capacity to please others and to know how to cope with chronic stress.

As calm and in control as we might feel on a conscious level, there is a part of us all deep within, the subconscious, that might resent certain aspects of a relationship or situation, be it at home or at work. Unless those troubling issues are resolved through mutual respect and good communication, or through positive changes in our circumstances, physical manifestations of the repressed anger, anxiety, and tension can show up in the form of bodily aches and pains.

After my recovery I searched for better ways to deal with stress and tension so that I stay healthy and pain-free. Thus, in last chapter of Rapid Recovery from Back and Neck Pain I share the results of my search. It includes nine proven steps for establishing good communication and resolving conflicts, eleven effective strategies for coping with stress and tension, four simple steps for immediately improving a marriage, and a three-step plan for raising well-disciplined, goal-oriented children with high self-esteem. These strategies have resolved the issues that were chronic sources of anger, anxiety, frustration, and tension in my life, and have made me much happier and healthier.

I believe they can do the same for you.