Why do some people heal without TMS knowledge

That would make sense if all symptoms began with an injury. Often, symptoms don't make sense. For example, I may have a sore ankle in the morning, tinnitus and vertigo at noon and asthma and heartburn at night. My initial symptom was migraine for 9 years and I would have thought your idea was possible then.

Sarno had 45 years of figuring this out based on recognizing trends in his population of patients. Just my opinion.

 

True enough.

I suppose I could rephrase my point to say that what would make a 'symptom' itself become chronic. I would imagine most people have symptoms of varying types and intensities at different stages and very often these symptoms exist alongside no objective signs of organic causality. I should state that my TMS/somatisation journey started about 9 years ago with severe health anxiety and a huge part of this was a total inability to accept and live with what I perceived as 'symptoms' (body noise) without attributing to some illness or disease. The more I've spoken with people who seem not to have the same issues as myself is that they seem to be able to 'just be' with their body noise and symptoms and not necessarily spend days, weeks, months and even years attempting to explain their symptoms and resolve them.

I am much the same as you in that I symptom shift to a quite remarkable degree. Whilst my back issue has been a constant (my back burner symptom if you will) I have also had a huge number of GI, neurological, type symptoms that pop up alongside it and these can last literally minutes, days or even months...there is totally no logic nor rhyme and reason to them.

Don't get me wrong I am not anti Sarno by any stretch of the imagination...I do have some doubts about the Freudian aspects of his thesis but on the whole I think he has brought a great deal to the concept of stress illness/somatisation.

 

All along - a very interesting conversation and I will chime in later when I have more time.

But to your last point about the Freudian aspects, it appeared to me from the very beginning a somewhat less convincing part of Sarno's theory, although there is a well-known to psychologists phenomenon called conversion disorder that Freud researched in-depth, that describes exactly many of TMS symptoms. But then there is Dr. Weekes theory of over-sensitization of the brain, or Dr. Levine's theory of PTSD, all not in any way contradicting Dr. Sarno but rather approaching the problem of psychosomatic disorders from a slightly different angle.

Myself experiencing a rare condition of dystonia (involuntary severe contractures of muscles and tendons), I found all three theories converging in explaining my condition and crucial to my recovery, each in its own way.

There are even more neuroscience-oriented approaches often quoted on this forum, that go into the subjects of neuroplasticity and brain maps, but the bottom line is that whether you are a purist who needs to stick with a single approach or "omnivore", all of them explain the role of the brain and psychological stimulation in the development of pain symptoms, as well as why some people are more susceptible to chronic pain than others. Some people are more obsessive than others, therefore they get stuck more often than others. Some people are more likely to experience symptoms in the muscles and tendons, while others develop skin conditions or immune disorders or migraines, but psychosomatic nature of those is more and more coming to light in the recent years in Western medicine. Interesting to note that Eastern medicines (Chinese, Tibetan, Ayurvedic etc) have known about connection between the mind and body for a long time, or to put it better, did not separate the mind and the body to begin with.