TMS in History

I'm reading Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larsen, about the events leading up to the Civil War, and I think I just read about a case of TMS.

William Seward had just started as Secretary of State for Lincoln and they had just gotten through the Inauguration, which the whole country was in a panic about. According to this book, he thought of himself as the wise one and responsible for keeping the country together and out of war. He had run against Lincoln for the presidential nomination and lost.

On March 9, a few days later, he was "detained from the Department by physical disability." He appeared to be suffering from "a sever attack of lumbago," according to a contemporary's account.

"Although a century later lumbago would be rendered a comical term, in 1861 it was a diagnosis for disabling back pain believed to arise from any number of potential causes, among them gout, tuberculosis, tumors, intestinal inflammation, even syphilis."

Sound familiar?

 

That sounds like it. Amazing...

 

There have been a LOT of Historical TMS cases...JFK is one and I believe someone posted a long thread here about it.

He could barely move , what with all his back braces and so forth. He was clearly wearing it the day he died, because the 'magic bullet' went through it.

But the oldest written account I have found is in the book of exodus.

Exodus 32;22-32.

'Brave' Jacob is terrified of his Brother and his brother's army coming to annihilate him. To protect himself, he puts his Family out in front and then retreats back over the river they just crossed.ALONE. Then he 'wrestles with an Angel' all night. I would think 'wrestle with his conscience' might be more appropriate.
From then on he walks with a limp because the angel 'put his hip out of joint'....we all know that intense sciatica often FEELS like our hip is out of joint, but is Just boring meat and potatoes TMS.
The verification of his fear is that in the following chapters; after slavishly ingratiating himself to his Brother (who he had wronged to the extreme), he doesn't keep his word to go and meet with him, but rather heads west into what was Schechem ( Mt Gerizim and Mt, Ebal) and the Modern day locale called Nablus.

I never thought about it, but all of our modern day problems in the middle east might stem from one mans TMS!

 

Thanks to this forum and my own experience, I became convinced that the practice of laying on hands was an effective way of treating psychosomatic disorders for centuries before Doctor Sarno came along. Of course, it required that the patients were believers in the magic of this practice...

 

I actually have a peculiar viewpoint on that.
I am not a fundamentalist , HOWEVER I was so desperate for a solution, ANY solution that I had Pentecostals pray over me to heal my back pain and problems....and about two weeks later I hit bottom and finally bought HBP and of course it all went away (the pain)

Well, Even with me NOT believing that their prayers would do anything, I did get better. Who am I to say their prayers didn't help or bring me to Sarno?
After stuff like that I'd be foolish to deny the power of positive prayer.
There are no atheists in Foxholes...and if you've gotten to this forum, you are probably in a foxhole

Maybe time to stop being so 'smart' ad maybe find a little belief?

 

We can probably spend miles of posts on this subject. And it would probably take me a lot of back and forth with you to distill my thoughts to full clarity. Any successful TMSer is entitled to a fully legitimate (nothing peculiar!) viewpoint on the subject, simply because each one of us reached the top of the mountain. But there are many pathways to reach the top, and I always tell people that they have to find their own path. I think we both agree that the fundamental requirement for TMS to heal is to believe in our brain's ability to defeat the pain. What that belief is and how we get there is a 100% individual journey.

For some, it would be a prayer by others, Pentecostals or not, for others it would be a prayer by themselves, for the rest of us it would be a firm belief in the inevitability of the brain re-wiring methodology based on the latest research of the neuroscientists (little tongue-in-cheek here, I am old enough to remember that lobotomy was the mainstream approach to treating some neurological conditions not long ago). But however people get there, if they are now pain-free, I am ready to uncork a big bottle of champagne for them and treat their method of healing as a legitimate one with full respect! In all honesty, I am still on this forum, 6 years after declaring myself healed, for the exhilarating moment of reading the success stories and re-living my own joy of recovery - selfishly so!

 

Cool discussion!