Rheumatoid arthritis

Anne, since I discovered TMS two years ago, I have come to the conclusion that TMS knowledge and awareness can help with ANY condition. Anxiety will make pain worse. Stress will worsen your overall health, and I believe that includes the pathology of metabolic diseases such as RA. I became even more convinced of this after reading When The Body Says No, by Dr. Gabor Mate, MD.

For an example of the relationship between anxiety and pain, I look back to my bike crash in 2008 when I broke my hip. This was three years before I discovered TMS and Dr. Sarno. I was overcome with terrible pain and overwhelming anxiety until the ER docs told me that I could have surgery to insert a few pins into the femur and that I'd be up on crutches the next day. I was so overjoyed that the only pain medication I took during the entire ordeal was ibuprofen and tylenol. After the surgery, whenever they came around asking about my pain level I finally started saying "I've had cramps worse than this - just give me some ibuprofen". I realize now that all of my worry was about being incapacitated, and once I discovered that I would be able to move around on my own just one day after the surgery, my pain level diminished to almost nothing.

Now, I realize that the vicious cycle of chronic pain is a whole different thing. I also don't know if RA is TMS (although I believe that Dr. Mate thinks it is a stress-based disease - and he says that stress physiologically changes our bodies - which goes well beyond TMS, which Dr. Sarno says is reversible). But I do believe that at least some pain of even a pathological condition can be relieved with mind-body awareness.

You can put Rheumatoid Arthritis into our new search engine on the wiki: http://search.tmswiki.org/ There are quite a number of hits, and it will be interesting to see what has been said about it in relation to TMS.

All the best,

Jan