Hey Everyone,
Thanks so much for your kind words and enthusiasm! It's so exciting to see our community growing. I definitely agree with Ellen that the number of members is the most important figure because helping people is what counts. According to Google this website is visited by about 11,000 different people per month, and it is the people who take the time to sign up (and then, even better, share their experiences) who form the core of our Peer Network.
Speaking of the milestones, we are almost to the 4,000 thread milestone! I just
checked and we are at currently at 3,991.
Forest, what's your take on that stat?
I should've known that it'd be someone with business experience like Tennis Tom who would immediately recognize the importance of this statistic
I'll be honest, it's a statistic that I take extremely seriously and that I've spent a lot of time exploring. It indicates difficulties facing online community organization going forward and also indicates some real challenges that the TMS movement faces. After all, in order to help people, we must first reach them, and the quantity of Google searches for "tension myositis syndrome" is one of the best indications we have of the number of people that the entire movement is able to reach. That number appears to be declining.
In terms of why it is happening, I think this is because the TMS movement has always been 95% driven by book sales, specifically, books by Dr. Sarno. Books by other authors are tremendously important once people know about TMS, but in terms of bringing new people in and overcoming their initial skepticism on a large, "mass audience" scale, I believe that that has happened through Dr. Sarno's books.
As we all know, when someone has TMS they immediately tend to "think physical." This is why they need to hear from a medical doctor that everything is OK and that they are not as fragile as they feel. Dr. Sarno's books have been absolutely crucial in reaching people and giving them the courage to open their minds to the idea of TMS. The "Doctor of Medicine" (MD) degree has a tremendous amount of credibility on matters of health.
However, Dr. Sarno's credibility goes beyond that. On the back of all four of Dr. Sarno's books, it mentions how Dr. Sarno was a professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. In terms of reaching mass audiences that type of medical authority is crucial. It provides a powerful and irreplaceable anchor of respectability that all TMS books written by non-MDs, to some extent, must rely on.
Unfortunately, when people look for medical books, most people want the most current and up to date books they can find. I know that when I look for medical books I want one that is published within the last 5-10 years that can take advantage of the most up-to-date science. Unfortunately, Dr. Sarno's two best-selling books were published in the 1990s. His best-selling book is now 23 years old, and his second best-selling book is now 15 years old. Consequently, over the years, their Amazon sales rank has been slipping.
I want to emphasize that I'm not talking about what is good or bad, but only what drives Google search volume. What is it that drives someone to sit down and type "tension myositis syndrome" into Google? People currently do this about 2400 times a month, and the question is, what drives that sort of volume? It's an important question for us, because if people can't find us and aren't open to our ideas, how can we possibly help them?
I'm actually quite hopeful about the future, though. Something pretty amazing happened in 2009. There are about a hundred practitioners who, usually through personal experience with Dr. Sarno's work, had independently started using TMS ideas in their own practices.
45 of them first got together in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the spring of 2009.
That same year, two nonprofits were created, one for practitioners and one for consumers. The one for practitioners is known as
the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association (It uses the term "psychophysiologic" to indicate that it isn't all in the psyche and that there are consequences in the physiology, meaning that it isn't "all in one's head"). On its board it has Dr. Ira Rashbaum, who is regarded as Dr. Sarno's successor as Dr. Sarno refers all of his former patients to him. It also has Dr. Eric Sherman, one of Dr. Sarno's most trusted psychologists.
The nonprofit behind this website,
the PPD/TMS Peer Network, is the one for consumers. Because it is organized by consumers, we call ourselves peers because amongst ourselves we are like a family of TMS in that we all have a very powerful common experience. The question is, what is our role?
Well, I don't think that I have to tell anyone reading this how much good this community can do for the people who find us. I'd like to mention another, equally important benefit we have, though. One of the largest PR obstacles that the TMS movement faces is that, to an outsider, it might look like all of the TMS books and professional services rendered are all about making money off of desperate people. While we know for a fact that this isn't true, we had a consultation with an elite PR consultant who said that this is one of the main challenges our movement faces. I am quite sure that he is right. People will look at websites of anyone who is making money off of TMS and immediately be skeptical, especially if the sponsor of the website doesn't have a great deal of formal training and education (i.e. a doctor or a psychologist).
However, as a nonprofit, this is where we have an extremely important role to play. Our board consists only of people who make absolutely no money off of TMS and this is core to our identity as a peer network. I personally have made a pledge not to accept any money or gifts related to my work on TMS in order to maintain my neutrality. Furthermore, we are organized as an
IRS-certified 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity. To skeptical members of the press this certification, combined with a great deal of transparency in our disclosures, goes a very long way in letting people know that this is not a money-making scheme and that many people, who have nothing financially to gain, care very deeply about it.
Given all of this I think that everyone reading this has a very important stake in this organization and I thank you all very much for your support. If it weren't for you folks I would have no reason to continue wanting to do this, but with such a vibrant and caring community to be a part of, I always know that I want to give this community the very best it can possibly have. I just wish that there was more time during the day to do it. However, I am tremendously encouraged by the growth we have had and plan in some sense to make this nonprofit my life's work. I fully intend to continue building it for the rest of my life.
What does all this mean going forward? I think we will have to be flexible and creative in terms of getting the word out. In the fall Becca and I plan to undertake a massive plan of Search Engine Optimization to help our content reach more people. As a 501c3 nonprofit that is trusted by many people I think that we should have great success with this, and then we can use this position to help other individuals and organizations, primarily practitioners, promote their contributions.
This brings up a vital point which is that the practitioners' role in all of this is crucial. I believe that they need us far more than most of them know to protect them from reputational attacks from those who are angered by the mention of a non-physical cause of their symptoms (for example, from people with fibromyalgia who often will attack them viciously and personally. It is stunning how angry these people can be when they don't accept TMS). This is what I was saying about money above, and the importance of being a nonprofit.
However, far more than they need us, we need them. Without licensed practitioners who can bring the authority of professional respectability and science to the table, no one will take us seriously. So it is really going to have to be a team effort. This is why, when I work for the TMS Wiki, I spend about 15-20 hours a week providing services to practitioners. We need to do our best to support them because without them, our movement does not have a future, as the numbers above indicate. This would be an absolutely terrible outcome because we all know how horrible it is to live a life crippled by TMS without knowing how to actually cure it.
This is why it is so important that we are really beginning to turn into a TMS movement. We may be decentralized, but there is no one in the movement who hasn't made enormous sacrifices because they care deeply about TMS and want to help people recover from it. While different people may have different approaches, I am continually impressed with how people are willing to put aside their differences and work for the common good to help spread the word about this life-changing diagnosis. My life was absolutely transformed by this discovery and if your life hasn't been transformed by it yet, I'm sure it soon will.
