DSL’s In-Depth SUMMARY of
Dr Sarnos Muscle and Back Pain Relief & His Work

And, What Is Emotional Intelligence?

This is a Continuation of the DSL Introduction and Access to the
Joe Polish I Love Marketing Podcast with Mr. Steve Ozanich[ez-toc]

The above linked web pages are on the podcast: Doctor Sarno Back Pain Relief w/ Joe Polish (a Mega-Marketing Master) & Emotional Release on the I Love Marketing Podcast: This is an Interview of Steve Ozanich, a Doctor Sarno Pain Expert.

This article ( BELOW on THIS page ) — about “Dr Sarno muscle and back pain relief” (as well as many other kinds of pain) — is written such that ANYONE can access and understand it. All technical terms and concepts are defined in layman’s terms.

However, this will be written in great part for Soft Tissue Therapists: Massage / Bodywork & Yoga / Stretching Practitioners, and some Physical and Occupational Therapists. Some Fitness Trainers and Psychotherapists are expanding into these areas as well. …

So the information is more “Technical” though not too complex for the General Public.

FIRST, a little bit about why what I have to say might be of some value to understanding the Full Scope of what Dr. Sarno dealt with in his career.

My therapeutic trainings & professional coaching mostly start with the physical body, and MAKE NO MISTAKE … there ARE forms of muscle therapy that, by working with the nerves, muscles & fascia, with a strong focus on Mindfulness, CAN resolve various long-term, chronic, complex pain & dysfunction.

I KNOW this because of my own extensive experience with MY OWN severe musculo-fascial pains and that of Clients with a very wide range of Long-term Chronic, Complex, Difficult-to-Treat problems in their “Soft Tissue Issues,” more fully described as their “Psycho*-Neuro-Musculo-Fascial & Joint Systems.”

* “Psycho-” The word root “psycho-” refers to the “breath, mind, soul” & “psychology” … because the MIND & EMOTIONS participate in, or can greatly influence, MOST of what muscles DO or WON’T do … but they SHOULD Do.

I’ve been asked several times why in my Therapy Trainings I highlight a process such as Dr. Sarno’s, given that his is almost purely mental & emotional in nature, with NO physical treatments involved. …

Yet MY primarily manual therapy eCourses, eConsulting, & eBooks deal directly with the psycho-physical body — the various body pains, pathology, and dysfunction — with MANUAL Methods: Hands-On (Medical Massage & Bodywork) & Yoga Therapy.  Yet they are with somewhat subtle but effective attention on the Mental & Emotional Processes & Mindfulness behind a Client’s physical tissue issues.

And therapists trained in this method have a LOT of success with Client’s various problems, including emotional stress, even though primarily — or initially — physical in nature. And sometimes, it’s the reverse.

So What Gives with all THAT seeming contradiction between what Dr. Sarno’s Method does and what people like I do?

I believe a truly GREAT Therapist has as wide a perspective as possible on body-mind pain, pathology & dysfunction with as many aspects of assessment and treatment as possible, even if they’re a specialist in a comparatively narrow area.

Dr. Sarno provides some very interesting & IMPORTANT perspectives on the pain relief issues at hand. (Literally and figuratively.) This helps a Therapist to know when to Refer a Client to other Practitioners when appropriate or necessary.

OR, it allows the soft tissue therapist to modify their assessment & treatment strategy to adapt to the Client’s different needs, should the Therapist’s standard approach not produce the desired results. …

Our approach, though it’s a hands-on, manual technique or physical stretching of the musculo-fascial units, is to take much of the attention OFF of the manual / physical therapeutic techniques and onto a more direct connection with the Client’s soft tissues and, ultimately, their Central Nervous System & Brain. As we do that, we also engage THEIR MIND to a greater extent than if the Client just received the therapy without much mental engagement. We are engaging the Client’s nervous system AND Mindful Attention to the highest degree they’re willing or interested in. Because THAT is where The REAL Action is!

WHAT IS That ACTION?

Well, it is actually a NON-Action, or the Act of Stopping of Doing Tension.

Our Aim is to help the Client discover how to achieve DEEP, Radical Relaxation of their Psycho-Neuro-Musculo-Fascial System.

And Relaxation is not some “new technique” you learn how to do. It is STOPPING DOING WHAT YOU ARE ALREADY DOING.

Metaphorically Speaking, there are NO OFF Buttons you can press to relax a muscle. There IS a button to turn the muscle ON. As long as you hold the ON button down, the muscle will stay contracted and tense.

SO … Relaxation is learning how to take your finger OFF of the ON Button! 

More accurately, You are UN-learning most of what you unconsciously learned to turn the muscle ON.

The Problem Is, it got STUCK in the ON position.

Our Method of helping the Client to discover relaxation at a deeper level is a relatively and deceptively simple technique, allowing more direct contact with deeper structures of the Client’s body, brain & mind. This is about dissolving neuro-muscular and myofascial tensions & stress at a deeper level than many therapeutic techniques in the massage & bodywork field achieve.

This is also a way to reduce Barriers & Resistance to a More FULL Expression of Emotional Intelligence, something that is become CRUCIAL to increased creativity, innovation, productivity, and profitability in the business world. It is at least, if not more so, important in personal relationships of ALL kinds.

Too many therapists are too focused on “delivering a technique” versus “feeling and responding” to the Client’s often very subtle differences, nuances, and reactivities in the texture & tensions of the soft tissues. It’s very often the attitudes and mental / emotional predispositions controlling — and sometimes producing — their body pain.

We also use a myo-structural approach to pain relief, giving us a wider range of information about possible sources of whatever problems or challenges a Client has. (MYO- refers to the the MUSCLE,. But a muscle is the neuro-muculo-fascial UNIT as a whole, synergistic system. The Muscle Cells are VERY tightly ensheathed by the Deep Fascia, so intertwined they are not separable except with a scalpel. When you are treating a muscle, you are, by definition, treating the muscle and deep fascia as a unified, integral system.

There IS the Superficial Fascia, but discussing that is outside the scope of this article. Suffice it to say it is extremely thin and can only be treated directly and independently by focusing on the skin, VERY close to the surface of the body.

Sometimes, the physical source of a body pain is quite a bit distant from where the Client experiences it. If so, chronic pain relief is seldom achieved, OR, it keeps coming back a day, week, or more later.

Also, in the healing professions, a highly restrictive “Scope of Practice” and Standard Of Care have nearly crippled truly wholistic (whole health, full range) approaches to human healing & wellness. The strict boundaries between the various healing professions must necessarily soften, or even dissolve, and perspectives & treatment strategies must expand and overlap if Clients and Patients of the World are to ever experience Full Spectrum & Whole Health Healing.

Hopefully, this knowledge about Sarno’s approach brought to you by the back pain podcast, Doctor Sarno Back Pain Relief w/ Joe Polish, will help bridge the gap between various aspects of bodymind health and therapies.

CLICK HERE for My (DSL’s) VERY In-Depth Comments on
The Doctor Sarno Muscle and Back Pain Relief Method 

OKAY! BACK to Dr Sarnos Muscle and Back Pain Relief Explained

Dr. Sarno developed a very non-invasive procedure for helping thousands of patients, and some non-patients who merely read his books ( !!! ), free themselves of neuro-musculo-fascial pain in various parts of their body. In fact, it’s about as non-invasive a chronic pain relief “procedure” as you can get. …

And many people — including many celebrities from around the world — found the method to make profound changes in their lives. … Even Howard Stern, the New York City radio personality, called Sarno The Steve Jobs of Pain Medicine and his HERO!

Sarno achieved all this purely by helping his patients get in touch with repressed (chronically hidden) emotional stress — such as rage, anger & guilt — held in the unconscious mind. Yet the emotion expresses itself, via the nerves, as chronic tension & stress in various muscles and organs of the body. There is nothing mystical or magical about the material covered in Doctor Sarno’s Back Pain Relief w/ Joe Polish or the I Love Marketing Podcast.

Emotional Intelligence ( EI )

It’s all within the realms of physical reality, as long as you understand that emotional phenomena are a function of the brain, mind & nervous system, and they are NOT “imaginary” (not real) feelings or events.

If YOU, or someone you observed, ever clenched their fists, or turned red in the face, or held themselves back from wanting to punch someone, THAT was a psycho-emotional event expressing itself through the physical body. If you ever witnessed a group of people in a sports bar jump out of their seats and yell for joy when their team scored a few points in their game, you saw emotional events directly affect sensations in and move the physical body.

Yet … It’s the muscles (or more precisely, neuro-musculo-fascial units), in turn, along with their interaction with their respective nerves, producing the actual mechanisms of expression of movement or physical pain ( among other things ), even if the muscles are responding “only” to emotions.

There is NOTHING strange or weird or mystical about this idea AT ALL. EVERYONE has experienced something like this in SOME form. Only question is whether or not they NOTICED it. And this is one key to Emotional Intelligence: NOTICING internal events like this that are often NOT fully and consciously experienced, IF AT ALL. Many people are NOT conscious of these Inner Events, and this is one element of what leads to a LACK of Emotional Intelligence. This can prevent full expression of what fully actualized Human Beings are capable of.

Anyway, after Dr. Sarno realized inflammation could NOT be reliably considered to be a source off pain, Sarno’s diagnosis for this Mind-Body-Pain phenomenon became Tension Myoneural Syndrome.

Myo (muscle) + Neural (nerve) = Myoneural ==> Muscular Tension, stimulated by chronically excess nerve activity, producing various symptoms and conditions (syndromes) in the body. And it should be noted that the BRAIN is actually one big bundle of nerves, and is a central part of the … Central Nervous System.

And one’s psycho-emotional states can produce “neural energy outputs” sending nerve tonus (neural energy signals) to the muscles and organs.

Originally, Sarno’s name for this was Tension *Myositis* Syndrome. But the prefix myo- means muscle and the suffix –itis means inflammation. So the word myositis implies inflammation of the muscle. Yet, as he confronted the reality that inflammation was NOT necessarily, and much or most of the time not at all, present in the areas of pain, he had to modify the term more accurately to Tension Myoneural Syndrome.

The importance of understanding that inflammation is very often NOT present in the muscles and joints during a pain cycle is critical to understanding the whole spectrum of what people are going through, and what to DO, and NOT do, about it.

Even though this realization about lack of inflammation in painful cases has appeared in the medical literature for three decades or more, Sarno was one of the more prominent to point out that it had never been clinically nor scientifically proven, barring any actual, recent, acute damage to the tissues. Nor was inflammation indeed a factor in most — or any — of the truly chronic pain conditions most people experience in the neuromuscular/myofascial/musculoskeletal system.

More on this in my Comments on the next web page, linked at the bottom of this page. But a key distinction is inflammation in the musculoskeletal system is very different than inflammation in the cardiovascular system, which IS a big problem for many people today. While a person could have a lot of inflammation in the bloodstream, and this CAN potentially contribute to degeneration and pain in the joints, they might also have NO ACTUAL inflammatory cells in the painful muscles & joints.

The medical implications of that are VERY important to understand, especially when they’re trying to prescribe anti-inflammatory drugs for conditions that are NOT inflammatory! … Doing so actually violates medical ethics.

Was Dr Sarnos Muscle and Back Pain Relief Method a Figment of His Imagination?

Though retired from practice now [and now passed away], as Sarno’s perspectives, research, and experience evolved, he eventually used NO manual or physical modalities AT ALL.

Mostly, he only used seminars (or his books) to educate patients or readers on the nature of emotionally-based stress manifesting as various symptoms (or syndromes) in their neuro-musculo-fascial-skeletal system.

(And YES, many people said reading his books ALONE produced significant or complete relief for their issues of body pain and desired chronic pain relief.)

A small percentage of patients needed one-on-one therapeutic counseling to make their breakthroughs.

Sarno tells the story of how he eventually let his manual therapy staff go because he did not want to reinforce the idea there was anything “physical” about any patient’s pain. It was not a happy day as he said the therapists were a great group of highly skilled and committed people.

Yet based on his growing experiences, his focus was increasingly on the psycho-emotional aspects, and he did not want to distract any patients from that non-physical focus. Sarno’s latest book, The Divided Mind (linked below to Amazon), is an extensive delve into the deeper layers of that aspect of his work.

The actual pain was (is) indeed produced by physical manifestations or expressions (muscle tension) of mental/emotional stress.

It is psychosomatic: psycho = “relating to the mind or psychology” and somatic = “relating to the body.” They work together in most cases. Most, if not all, emotional & mental phenomena activate respective nerve pathways, which are, of course, physical.

If you can FEEL it, there’s a physical nerve somewhere bringing physical sensory data to the upper brain (cerebral cortex). In response, the brain and nerves send signals back out to the muscles, organs, and systems of the body, stimulating them into action (excitation), or inaction (inhibition), as a response to what the sensory system is perceiving.

An Abundance Of Nerves Are Embedded in Muscles, Subject To Irritations & Impingement
SEE Image to Right … ➡️➡️➡️

Some nerves lead to various muscles, causing them to contract.

As muscles contract, they tend to bulge and harden (see illustrations to the right and below, right). This can press on certain adjacent blood vessels or nerves. Sometimes, the nerve goes to an organ, causing digestive or metabolic problems.

If this happens once in a while, or the emotional event is of low-level intensity, it’s usually no problem.

But if it does not get resolved, and there’s a longer term, persistent process going on, and of greater intensity, and the respective brain-nerve-muscle pathway(s) stay(s) stimulated long enough, often enough, this produces chronic (habitual) muscle tension or “tight muscles.” Or hyperactive organs, eventually degenerating or breaking down.

HOW Dr Sarnos Muscle and Back Pain Relief can Happen from Relieving “Tight Muscles”

Chronically “tight muscles” can physically impinge on other nerve trunks or restrict blood flow to an area, or otherwise irritate other nerves and soft tissues. It can become a vicious cycle, and very often, it all originates in the sub- or unconscious parts of the brain and mind, unknown to the person.

Restricted blood flow (called ischemia) reduces oxygen levels (called hypoxia). …

It is a medical fact that ischemia and hypoxia can produce pain.

From Wikipedia: (bold text added for emphasis by me, DSL)

Ischemia is a restriction in blood supply to tissues, causing a shortage of oxygen [hypoxia] and glucose needed for cellular metabolism (to keep tissue alive). 

Ischemia is generally caused by problems with blood vessels, with resultant damage to or dysfunction of tissue. It also means local anemia in a given part of a body sometimes resulting from congestion (such as vasoconstriction, thrombosis or embolism).

NOTE: Ischemia comprises not only insufficiency of oxygen, but also reduced availability of nutrients and inadequate removal of metabolic wastes. Ischemia can be partial (poor perfusion, that is, malperfusion) or total. [Perfusion means to permeate or saturate an area. ~DSL]

Signs and Symptoms
Since oxygen is carried to tissues in the blood, insufficient blood supply causes tissue to become starved of oxygen. In the highly aerobic [oxygen utilizing] tissues of the heart and brain, irreversible damage to tissues can occur in as little as 3–4 minutes at body temperature. The kidneys are also quickly damaged by loss of blood flow (renal ischemia). Tissues with slower metabolic rates may undergo irreversible damage after 20 minutes.

Clinical manifestations of acute limb ischemia (which can be summarized as the “six P’s”) include pain, pallor, pulseless, paresthesia, paralysis, and poikilothermic.

Without immediate intervention, ischemia may progress quickly to tissue necrosis and gangrene within a few hours. Paralysis is a very late sign of acute arterial ischemia and signals the death of nerves supplying the extremity.

Foot drop may occur as a result of nerve damage. Because nerves are extremely sensitive to hypoxia, limb paralysis or ischemic neuropathy may persist after revascularization and may be permanent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ischemia … [NOTE and emphasis added ~DSL]

One of the areas I wish I had been able to talk to Dr. Sarno about is this:

He often said or wrote that the pain people have does not harm them. Yet the explanation from Wikipedia said “irreversible damage to tissues can occur in as little as 3–4 minutes.”

Was Dr. Sarno only assuming low degrees of ischemia and hypoxia, or what?

And maybe Wikipedia’s explanation refers to an extreme state. I don’t know what Dr. Sarno’s thing was there.

Yet this process ischemic is potentially operating as Tension Myoneural Syndrome ( or C.E.M.&.N.T. — Chronic, Excess Musculo-Fascial & Nerve Tension, Stress & Negative Habit Patterns — as I call it my own therapeutic paradigm), even if at a less intense or severe level. The degree of muscular impingement on nerves and blood vessels is, well, a matter of degree.

So, even though emotionally-based issues might start “in the head,” they can become very physical in nature, becoming Soft Tissue Issues, and are not anything to mess with or ignore.

This is one reason why practicing preventive Tension Reduction Strategies (TRS) [my term] like yoga, tai chi, meditation, etc., and receiving therapeutic massage or bodywork, and other relaxation-based activities, can be so helpful in staying healthy and pain-free over a lifetime.

Dr. Sarno’s approach, however, is to attempt to go to the root cause of the soft tissue issues (nerves, muscles, blood vessels, organs), which in many of his successful patients, was initiated in or within the mind & emotions. But I believe getting hit by a Mack Truck or falling down stairs can be a significant initiating factor as well.

(BTW … Few people realize emotions are PRIMARILY physical and secondarily mental in nature.)

Dr. Sarno coached his Patients on how to observe and understand their emotional states in such a way as to dissolve those sources of excess neural activity affecting the muscles and organs. (Many of the organs are constructed of smooth muscles, also subject to accumulated tension and stress. This can produce significant health issues by interfering with various metabolic processes.)

If psycho-emotionally driven, excess nerve output to the physical nerves, muscles, glands & organs can be reduced, the muscles, glands & organs can then relax, reducing or eliminating reduced blood flow (ischemia) & reduced oxygen (hypoxia). …

Restoring proper oxygen levels can eliminate pain.

MY ADDITIONAL COMMENTS ON SOURCES OF PAIN …

I have additional hypotheses about all this, including what I call neuromuscular discombobulation (confusion of the muscles), but in no way contradicting Dr. Sarno’s diagnosis or methods. This only adds understanding and dimension while acknowledging that SOME chronic body pains are indeed primarily due to physical insults to the soft tissues of the body, while others are internally generated by mental and emotional processes.

There are, of course, acute injuries where there are damaged tissues such as broken bones or lacerations, tears or ruptures to the tissues. That is, obviously, a different category of pain.

Yet I do observe, and therefore believe, many people CAN respond to and heal from physical methods, if properly evaluated, strategized, and administered, and depending on the source of their pain. This is discussed on the next web page in this series and other pages on this and other of my websites. …

But PLEASE! Go there AFTER you listen to the Podcast: Doctor Sarno Back Pain Relief w/ Joe Polish

Some people, of course, need an emphasis on one or the other ( physical or mental-emotional ), or both. OR, they have a metabolic / nutritional issue that could be the main cause of their pain or dysfunction.

That, of course, is another realm of therapeutics altogether, usually involving diet & nutrition, lifestyle changes, and the relatively new field of Functional Medicine.

Link to the I Love Marketing Podcast
about Dr. Sarno by CLICKING HERE

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The Doctor Sarno Back Pain Relief Method for
“Physical / Structural Degeneration”

Of Great Importance, many of Sarno’s pain victims had visible and significant evidence of “structural” degeneration of the bones and joints, in many cases severe degeneration, such as mild to severe osteoarthritis of the joints, or stenosis, often bone-on-bone. (See my page on this site about bone-on-bone conditions. You might be surprised!) This includes spondylolisthesis, stenosis, herniated or ruptured discs, visible bone-on-bone, hard tissue joint degeneration, and such.

Despite visible evidence (via X-ray and MRI) of such degeneration, sometimes “obvious” and extensive, and a “NO other Option” diagnosis by the surgeons, a large percentage of Sarnos’ patients became pain-free, or nearly so, with NO physical treatment, let alone surgery.

This includes many cases of visible (on X-ray or MRI) spinal stenosis (narrowing of the spinal canal or openings), considered by many physicians to be a “sure thing” for needing surgery.

Yet many of Dr. Sarno’s stenosis patients became pain-free with his emotionally based strategy, and NO physical treatment.

And these were, in a high percentage of cases, not just temporary, short-term fixes. Many of them had long-lasting relief. Great and competent therapists need to be on the lookout for such possibilities.

I know of one individual in whom a lumbar vertebra had broken apart into tiny pieces and migrated rearward into the nerve tissue of the spinal cord itself. Surgery gave instant and more-or-less permanent relief. That is one of the rare cases where I think surgery actually was called for and might have been the only real solution.

On the other hand, I have had many Clients who had pain & dysfunction problems for years or decades before they found me. I worked with them, got them pain-free, and years later they were STILL pain-free.

Dr. Sarno’s track record was, of course, not 100%. His results varied from study to study, yet many physicians and researchers found the results very impressive. But I’ll address that in my comments on the next page, as well as several myths on such things as osteoarthritis and “bone-on-bone” pathology.

YES, I DO want you to listen to the podcast before you go to the next page.
Or at least come back to the podcast later.

Useful Information & Insight On Accuracy
(or not) Of Medical Diagnoses

Of Great Value in Dr. Sarno’s books are thorough descriptions of most of the common structurally related diagnoses originating in various distortions or breakdowns in the bone & joint structures. Yet he very well debunks notions that these are always or even often the actual cause of pain, at least in many cases. This knowledge is invaluable to both Soft Tissue Therapists as well as their Clients & Patients in attempting to educate them on the Myths & Realities of body pain and chronic pain relief.

One Example of this out of my own direct experience is severe scoliosis, which is very often accompanied by a lot of PAIN. Too many people, including physicians and therapists, believe the pain comes from bad posture or poor alignment associated with the curves of the spine. Yet, in reality, the pain comes from the hyper-contracted soft tissues. BOTH the pain AND the excess curves are the result of over-shortened muscles (the Green Lines in the illustrations to the right). Lengthening (relaxing) the over-shortened muscles is the key to straightening the spine.

The Exception is some people are born with misshapen vertebrae, which limits how far the spine can straighten. Most scoliosis is NOT from genetic birth defects, however. It is from muscles that have over-shortened for a number of possible reasons. 

BTW, if one thinks the Red Muscles in the illustration are TOO WEAK to hold the spine straight and upright, that thinking ignores some very fundamental principles of science.

I’ve had a number of people with strong to severe postural distortions whose pain was diminishing BEFORE their posture started to straighten.

All of this is important so the therapist can explain to the Client or Patient why joint degeneration observable on X-ray or MRI does NOT necessarily nor directly correlate with the cause of their pain. In many cases, rather than joint degeneration causing the pain, it is the excess, chronic muscle tension causing BOTH the joint degeneration (actual grinding or wearing down of joint surfaces) AND the pain.

This means treating the excess muscle tension reduces or eliminates the degenerative compression on the joints AND reduces or eliminates the muscle tension irritating local tissues and causing pain.

I will reference all that on the next web page, the addendum to this page.

This perspective is also a good element of a presentation for Potential Clients, who might be looking for better answers to the puzzles of their body pain, joint dysfunction, and pathologically poor posture or movement.

Another important factor in bone-on-bone and broken down cartilage issues is, as I report on my page about Bone-on-Bone issues:

In many, if not most, cases, the cause of the pain is NOT the degenerating cartilage or bone-on-bone contact. In fact, it is well established that there are, as stated above, VERY few ( IF ANY ) “pain sensitive”* nerve endings WITHIN the various joints of the body or spinal discs.

Cartilage does not contain blood vessels (it is avascular) or nerves (it is aneural).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartilage

If there are, by Nature’s Design, NO NERVES (aneural) within cartilage, it CANNOT be the direct source of pain (nociceptive) signals to the CNS and brain. (CNS = central nervous system.)

The pain originates in the soft tissues surrounding the joint, but not IN the joint. So the bone-on-bone, the destruction of the cartilage, does NOT produce sensations of pain. THAT is why soft tissue work relives pain. Because it is the pulls and pressures, usually from the muscles, irritating the nerve endings that produce the pain. … Relax the muscles, no more irritating the nerve endings, no more pain.

Admittedly, Dr. Sarno’s work on body pain and chronic pain relief has been VERY controversial, especially among more orthodox physicians. They usually attack the fact that most of his results are based on “anecdotal stories.” Yet their criticism usually falls short. Especially with how often orthodox diagnosis and treatment (usually drugs or surgery, some physical therapy, and occasional bed rest) fails, does not last, or has significant side effects. (Even bed rest can have significant negative side-effects!)

It should be noted that I fully recognize it would be GREAT if we could get “real,” highly scientific studies to confirm or disconfirm much of what Dr. Sarno and many others say on a wider basis, or even what I say on the next page, as well as the great work being done by a number of soft tissue therapists around the world. However, securing funding for such somewhat expensive studies is usually quite difficult. As well, filtering for the many variable factors in such kinds of conditions and treatment methods, and the very high variability of skills of therapists is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

When you are testing precisely manufactured machines or chemicals for efficacy, you get relatively precise feedback on all tests. When human beings, as therapists or doctors, are administering a treatment or process, there is wide variance due to skill, experience, motivation, attitude, and so on.

One dose of a drug can be manufactured to be nearly identical to all other doses of the same drug. The same goes for machines. This allows for precise measurement of therapeutic results from specific remedies. So their effects can be measured rather precisely.

But not all therapists, nor doctors, nor their techniques, are created even close to equal. And one, for example, neuromuscular therapist, with the SAME training, is most likely to produce VERY different experiences than another.

Hands-on therapy is a very individual process and cannot be reproduced with a high degree of precision every single time. And the certainty that one particular Client will receive the exact same effects as another Client, even with the SAME therapist using the same methods, is not highly likely. So, it’s a very unlikely prospect that the many problems in such comparative studies could be completely resolved anytime soon.

But hopefully, at some point, enough resources will be found, by someone, to perform at least somewhat more “scientifically acceptable” studies of much less reproducible methods.

If not, the anecdotes will have to do. … And there are a LOT of those!

In the meantime, Case Studies can be highly instructive, even if not 100%. Ignoring the anecdotal (personal experience) stories of so many people, including physicians, makes NO sense at all. After all, as Robert Mendelsohn, author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic, pointed out, in most “orthodox” medical practices, the bottom line is, very often, asking how the patient feels after treatment.

That’s about as “subjective” and “anecdotal” as you can get. Yet it’s probably THE most common question asked of most patients by most of their doctors, most of the time.

Yet one criticism might be justified, that being, not everyone responds well, or at all, to The Sarno Method. But that quite possibly means their Soft Tissue Issues had a more physical source, rather than being psycho-emotional in nature.

Hopefully, listening to the Doctor Sarno Back Pain Relief with Joe Polish Podcast will help you decide if it’s something you should look into or pursue. (As if any modality offered by orthodox, alternative or complementary medicine, works all the time, every time, either.) …

My more detailed, wider-ranging responses to all that are included on the next web page …

Mind-Body Connection-Healing Back Pain-Dr Sarno Back Pain Relief

Here is the Short LInk if the above links not working: https://wp.me/P8qnpZ-6t

But First, Please Listen to the Podcast …

THANK YOU for Reading about Dr Sarnos Muscle and Back Pain Relief! I hope it was of some Value to You!

David Scott Lynn (DSL*)
* DSL: Your Hi-Touch Up-Link to the Inner-Net*
* Inner-Net: Your Psycho-Neuro-Musculo-Fascial & Joint System