Physiological Changes

The underlying premise of Dr. Sarno’s work is that the repressed, unconscious fear and anger described in (1) can actually induce physiological changes.

Dr. Sarno came to this conclusion as a result of dealing with patients suffering from back and joint pain. In the vast majority of his patients, Dr. Sarno noticed a history of tension-induced disorders such as heartburn, pre-ulcer symptoms, hiatus hernia, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, spastic colon, tension headache, migraine and eczema. Whilst not all in the medical profession agree that these disorders are psychosomatically-induced, based on his consistent clinical observations and on the failure of conventional treatments,  Dr. Sarno felt confident that indeed they were.

Sarno also noticed that heating pads, massage therapy and physical therapy seemed to provide significant pain relief to his patients, albeit temporarily. Since those therapies simply increased blood circulation to the applied areas, Sarno further conjectured that the real cause of pain was a reduction of blood supply to soft tissues in the affected areas, initiated by emotionally-induced tension. His texts go into much greater detail on how the limbic and autonomous nervous systems are able to produce such effects.

According to Sarno, TMS is pain syndrome and does not lead to permanent damage of the affected soft tissues, despite the intensity of the pain. Simply understanding that the pain is tension-induced and not a structural problem is the key to a “cure”. Sarno noticed that once his patients understood that they were suffering from such tension, they were able to resume their normal activities without pain.

It is important to emphasize that according to Sarno’s TMS theory, the cause of the pain is entirely psychosomatic in nature and not a consequence of underlying musculoskeletal abnormalities as typically diagnosed by conventional medical practitioners. The pain is not caused by muscle tears, tissue inflammation, herniation, degeneration, decrepit muscles, bad ergonomics, poor posture or bad typing techniques. None of these are the cause. The root cause is entirely a sea of repressed, unconscious, negative emotions which must be confronted. This is a tough pill to swallow for RSI sufferers who have received diagnosis of underlying musculoskeletal disorders from various doctors and who can testify that the pain they feel is indeed frighteningly real.

According to TMS, what is often diagnosed as tendonitis, bursitis, fascitis, metatarsalgia, shin splints, tennis elbow, sciatica, carpal tunnel syndrome, deQuervain syndrome and so are simply areas of soft tissues not receiving enough oxygen. Something interesting to note is that people with real structural problems often don’t experience any pain whatsoever, and yet people with perfect structural composition might undergo excruciating pain. This pattern is common within computer-related RSI sufferers.

So how do the mind and body conspire against you in this way? How do they know what physiological modifications to make in order for these unacceptable emotions to go away? The answer to this question is remarkable. Most assuredly the sufferer will develop symptoms least likely to be attributed to the underlying negative emotions - symptoms attributable to a structural abnormality or something “mechanically wrong”. So long as the conscious mind believes that the pain is mechanical nature, believes that something wrong with their wrist or joint, then this mechanism is doing its job and the  distraction will remain in place with the true cause – the underlying negative emotions – remaining unconfronted and repressed.

NEXT: Physical symptoms

Stop hand pain, improve seating posture and increase blood circulation with this award winning ergonomics software.