Dr. Sarno has succeeded, but he shall not prevail.

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So you now have transitioned from criticizing Dr. Schubiner to mocking him ("nonsense") and questioning his motives? This truly has no place on this forum, in my opinion. Nor does your negativity (telling people they are "doomed").

 

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You are the one setting up and constantly espousing false conflicts between Dr. Sarno and the many other clinicians in the field of mind-body medicine whose insights and methods have been helpful to many people here on this forum and elsewhere. It serves no purpose. You seem to be writing to convince yourself.

Different theories, different approaches, resonate with and help different people. Even a cursory reading of the success stories here and on the "other" forum (the one that was wrecked for the most part by stupid infighting over orthodoxy) shows that. And there's no important conflict anyhow; you are focusing on minutiae not the big picture.

 

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I am only offended by the effort to foist dogma on others, and the criticism of compassionate and knowledgeable clinicians who are doing a tremendous amount to help people. I wish you would let it go as someone previously urged you to, to date this forum has been largely free of the orthodoxy wars that ruined the other one.

 

I believe in TMS. It healed me from severe back pain.

I don't think it is helpful to post negatively about TMS. It does no good to anyone to rain on other people's parade.

 

Sweetheart, Sarno couldn't espouse neuroplasticity because the field of neuroscience barely existed at the time he wrote. It was a subdivision of medicine with a nod to the psychological but there were pioneering doctors writing about the effects of emotion and tension on the body way back in the 40's and 50's.

I found an old notebook recently in which I wrote out a couple of quotes from The MindBody Prescription. Sarno is writing on the subject of conversion disorders and suggests they have the same underlying processes as TMS. It reads as follows:

"The crucial point is that the symptoms are not the result of damage or disease of specific body parts. They are perceived as weakness, pain, numbness or blindness only because the appropriate brain cells have been fired off...one set of brain cells is stimulated by other brain cells, in this case the stimulating cells are those having to do with powerful unconscious emotions...What's important is not the method the brain uses to produce symptoms; it is the fact that the brain is inducing symptoms...keeping Dr. Perts work in mind...it is only difficult to explain at a fundamental level, the level of the black box."

The accompanying diagram begins with The Limbic System and breaks down the process, passing through "the black box" through activation of the hypothalamus and onto the Autonomic system. At this point Sarno's own diagram says TMS happens.

What neuroscientists and pioneers like Schubiner and Hanscom are doing is simply explaining the black box that Sarno described. They have gained access and are exploring the magnificence and mystery of it and I am sure John Sarno keeps a friendly, interested eye on the discoveries. His brilliance is not diminished by science, only enhanced.

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift and it is wonderful. It is also wonderful that more and more people are healing due to these insights. This is cause for celebration.

Cast your eyes upward to the title of this forum. It is called The Mindbody Syndrome Discussion Forum. Not the Tension Myositis Syndrome. All contributions are welcomed and embraced because they all add to our understanding of the black box and in so doing we are able to translate the wisdom of these discoveries into healing.

Let it be now. Let people heal.

 

Plum -- and in the 1920's.

http://courses.washington.edu/hmed665i/MSJAMA_Landmark_Article_The_Care_of_the_Patient.html (MS/JAMA - Landmark Article: The Care of the Patient [full text JAMA, Mar. 19, 1927;88:877-882])


PHYSIOLOGIC DISTURBANCES FROM EMOTIONAL REACTIONS
What is the matter with all these patients? Technically, most of them come under the broad heading of the "psychoneuroses"; but for practical purposes many of them may be regarded as patients whose subjective symptoms are due to disturbances of the physiologic activity of one or more organs or systems. These symptoms may depend on an increase or a decrease of a normal function, on an abnormality of function, or merely on the subjects becoming conscious of a wholly normal function that normally goes on unnoticed; and this last conception indicates that there is a close relation between the appearance of the symptoms and the threshold of the patient's nervous reactions. The ultimate causes of these disturbances are to be found, not in any gross structural changes in the organs involved, but rather in nervous influences emanating from the emotional or intellectual life, which, directly or indirectly, affect in one way or another organs that are under either voluntary or involuntary control.
Every one has had experiences that have brought home the way in which emotional reactions affect organic functions. Some have been nauseated while anxiously waiting for an important examination to begin, and a few may even have vomited; others have been seized by an attack of diarrhea under the same circumstances. Some have had polyuria before making a speech, and others have felt thumping extrasystoles or a pounding tachycardia before a football game. Some have noticed rapid shallow breathing when listening to a piece of bad news, and others know the type of occipital headache, with pain down the muscles of the back of the neck that comes from nervous anxiety and fatigue.
These are all simple examples of the way that emotional reactions may upset the normal functioning of an organ. Vomiting and diarrhea are due to abnormalities of the motor function of the gastro-intestinal tract—one to the production of an active reversed peristalsis of the stomach and a relaxation of the cardiac sphincter, the other to hyperperistalsis of the large intestine. The polyuria is caused by vasomotor changes in renal circulation, similar in character to the vasomotor changes that take place in the peripheral vessels in blushing and blanching of the skin, and in addition there are quite possibly associated changes in the rate of blood flow and in blood pressure. Tachycardia and extrasystoles indicate that not only the rate but also the rhythm of the heart is under a nervous control that can be demonstrated in the intact human being as well as in the experimental animal. The ventilatory function of the respiration is extraordinarily subject to nervous influences; so much so, in fact, that the study of the respiration in man is associated with peculiar difficulties. Rate, depth and rhythm of breathing are easily upset by even minor stimuli, and in extreme cases the disturbance in total ventilation is sometimes so great that gaseous exchange becomes affected. Thus, I remember an emotional young woman who developed a respiratory neurosis with deep and rapid breathing, and expired so much carbon dioxide that the symptoms of tetany ensued. The explanation of the occipital headaches and of so many pains in the muscles of the back is not entirely clear, but they appear to be associated with changes in muscular tone or with prolonged states of contraction. There is certainly a very intimate correlation between mental tenseness and muscular tenseness, and whatever methods are used to produce mental relaxation will usually cause muscular relaxation, together with relief of this type of pain. A similar condition is found in the so-called writers' cramp, in which the painful muscles of the hand result, not from manual work, but from mental work.
One might go on much further, but these few illustrations will suffice to recall the infinite number of ways in which physiologic functions may be upset by emotional stimuli, and the manner in which the resulting disturbances of function manifest themselves as symptoms. These symptoms, although obviously not due to anatomic changes, may, nevertheless, be very disturbing and distressing, and there is nothing imaginary about them. Emotional vomiting is just as real as the vomiting due to pyloric obstruction, and so-called "nervous headaches" may be as painful as if they were due to a brain tumor. Moreover, it must be remembered that symptoms based on functional disturbances may be present in a patient who has, at the same time, organic disease, and in such cases the determination of the causes of the different symptoms may be an extremely difficult matter. Every one accepts the relationship between the common functional symptoms and nervous reactions, for convincing evidence is to be found in the fact that under ordinary circumstances the symptoms disappear just as soon as the emotional cause has passed.
But what happens if the cause does not pass away? What if, instead of having to face a single three-hour examination, one has to face a life of being constantly on the rack? The emotional stimulus persists, and continues to produce the disturbances of function. As with all nervous reactions, the longer the process goes on, or the more frequently it goes on, the easier it is for it to go on. The unusual nervous track becomes an established path. After a time, the symptom and the subjective discomfort that it produces come to occupy the center of the picture, and the causative factors recede into a hazy background. The patient no longer thinks "I cannot stand this life," but he says out loud "I cannot stand this nausea and vomiting. I must go to see a stomach specialist."
Quite possibly the comment on this will be that the symptoms of such "neurotic" patients are well known, and they ought to go to a neurologist or a psychiatrist and not to an internist or a general practitioner. In an era of internal medicine, however, which takes pride in the fact that it concerns itself with the functional capacity of organs rather than with mere structural changes and which has developed so many "functional tests" of kidneys, heart, and liver, is it not rather narrow minded to limit one's interest to those disturbances of function which are based on anatomic abnormalities? There are other reasons, too, why most of these "functional" cases belong to the field of general medicine. In the first place, the differential diagnosis between organic disease and functional disturbance is often extremely difficult, and it needs the broad training in the use of general clinical and laboratory methods which forms the equipment of the internist. Diagnosis is the first step in treatment. In the second place, the patients themselves frequently prefer to go to a medical practitioner rather than to a psychiatrist, and in the long run it is probably better for them to get straightened out without having what they often consider the stigma of having been "nervous" cases. A limited number, it is true, are so refractory or so complex that the aid of the psychiatrist must be sought, but the majority can be helped by the internist without highly specialized psychologic technic, if he will appreciate the significance of functional disturbances and interest himself in their treatment. The physician who does take these cases seriously—one might say scientifically—has the great satisfaction of seeing some of his patients get well, not as the result of drugs, or as the result of the disease having run its course, but as the result of his own individual efforts.
Here, then, is a great group of patients in which it is not the disease but the man or the woman who needs to be treated. In general hospital practice physicians are so busy with the critically sick, and in clinical teaching are so concerned with training students in physical diagnosis and attempting to show them all the types of organic disease, that they do not pay as much attention as they should to the functional disorders. Many a student enters practice having hardly heard of them except in his course in psychiatry, and without the faintest conception of how large a part they will play in his future practice. At best, his method of treatment is apt to be a cheerful reassurance combined with a placebo. The successful diagnosis and treatment of these patients, however, depends almost wholly on the establishment of that intimate personal contact between physician and patient which forms the basis of private practice. Without this, it is quite impossible for the physician to get an idea of the problems and troubles that lie behind so many functional disorders. If students are to obtain any insight into this field of medicine, they must also be given opportunities to build up the same type of personal relationship with their patients.

 

Francis Peabody also well understood the nocebo effect.

You will find that physicians, by wrong diagnoses and ill considered statements, are responsible for many a wrecked life, and you will discover that it is much easier to make a wrong diagnosis than it is to unmake it.

 

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Well said. I have the right to question your theories - and so I do. To question neuroplasticity like you do - "is damning and I will never accept the lies and ignorance of those who" deny "science to keep us from growing our potential". I have seen brain scans that demonstrate neuroplasticity, which is brain's ability to change, being directed to do so by the mind. And, by the way, brain is body, so Mindbody includes brain as part of the body and at the same time the medium and container for the mind.

 

Dear heart,

The Limbic System. Unconscious, automatic, instinctive. It's our old brain and interestingly the part that governs the whole "my god is bigger than your god" so typical of religions founded on fear.

Old and outdated science. Nobel Laureate Santiago Ramon y Cayal (1953-1934) mistakenly believed that brain cells were unique and couldn't regenerate. Hence the years of indoctrinated bosh you refer to. They were still churning it out when I was a psychology undergraduate.

In 1998 the journal Nature Medicine published a report by Peter Eriksson that demonstrated 'Neurogenesis in the Adult Human Hippocampus." Cue a paradigm shift.

I suppose these discussions rest upon what we mean by the unconscious. For some it is a metaphor, for others it is literally the Autonomic Nervous System. Candace Pert said the body was the unconscious mind. I took a shine to her teachings because she was also a woman of faith and she described us as flickering flames rather than slabs of meat. I admire people who retain that sense of wonder. She also explained how one cell bacterium are hard-wired for bliss. Nature is generous like that.

There are so many things that could be discussed. We could veer into Wittgenstein, Descartes, Descartes Error (Damasio), Damasios Error. We could explore the speculative theories on the origins of consciousness in the bicameral mind a'la Julian Jaynes, we could revel in the beautiful and assured writing of Paul Broks who presents case studies of those who've experienced brain trauma and the "reset of their personality dials."

Ultimately though this whole debate hinges on whether we accept the freudian model of the unconscious (1915) as a cauldron of primitive impulses along with his take on the structure of the psyche and the need for defence mechanisms or whether we choose to reject it either in favour of something like Wilson's adaptive unconscious (2004), or to reject it completely.

Rousseau or Hobbes? Forgive my feminine sentimentality for I'm a romantic. I like wine, music and song. I will always prefer poetry and mystery over facts and hard science but I don't find my faith or sense of awe is diminished by the explanations of those who look more closely. Instead I find it enriched.

I am pagan and am quite used to the feeling of others trampling over my faith with man-made ideas so I do sympathise. I shall close with one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite authors:

"Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table."

~ D.H. Lawrence

Or as Freud simply stated, "Civilisation is madness."

 

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Rest assured as long as there are souls as passionate as you and I, humanity and our beautiful minds and delicious emotions will triumph. Let the scientists have their day in the sun while we sit on a grassy hill and chat about our respective thoughts on life. Thank you for the compliment. In return I relish flinting off your mind. The sparks conjure beautiful flames.

 

When peer support becomes proselytizing, as it has with you, it ceases to be helpful. Several people have tried to convey this to you but you don't listen.

 

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