Dr. Stracks's Recovery Story (from TMS patient to TMS physician)

If any of you are in the Chicago area and have TMS, you're probably familiar with Dr. John Stracks... he's an excellent TMS physician who's been at Northwestern for many years and just left to start his own practice.

He's actually MY doctor, and he's the one who introduced me to TMS concepts in the first place. I went to his 6-week discussion group and lecture, and ended up getting rid of 5+ years of debilitating migraines, 7+ years of knee pain, and 5+ years of sciatica attacks.

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Stracks came into the studio and told his full story of his own TMS recovery journey (you may not know that he struggled with this, too, before he went to med school!). He eventually got rid of a myriad of extreme neurological symptoms (numbness and tingling at the extremities, swelling, etc), and went on to start his own practice and help people like me.

I put together his full story for an episode of our podcast, and thought you all might find it inspiring in your journey! We also go over my recovery story, so it's kind of like a two-for-one testimonial episode.

You can find the full episode here.

As you'll hear in the episode, the big turning point in my own recovery was hearing a testimonial from someone who was a lot like me. It gave me such hope that this approach would work for my pain (and it did!). My life is basically pain free now, and definitely free from FEAR of pain. I hope this story can help someone the way Jessica's story helped me.

Enjoy!

 

Dr Stracks is my doctor too and I loved hearing his story! I had chronic feet pain from 2001-2016 and tried everything under the sun to get better (even 3 surgeries!), but in the end it was TMS and Dr Stracks that got me to be 90% pain-free! Thanks for recording his story. It was really great to hear!

 

He's my doctor too - it took only one visit to feel so much better.

 

Just wanted to say that I just listened and enjoyed the podcast, Laura. Very encouraging stuff and it's always helpful to hear real people talking about this stuff (as opposed to reading words on a page.)

 

@WantToBelieve @CGP so glad to hear that Dr. Stracks has been able to help you, too! It is pretty fun to hear that even the physicians who help us most had their own struggles. TMS really is a human condition - it just manifests differently in each of us.

@wilforbis Thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it. We have two more recovery stories we released this month that you might enjoy, too...

https://www.curablehealth.com/podcast/susan-vs-migraine-one-womans-life-changing-journey-with-the-curable-app (Susan vs. Migraine: One Woman’s Life-Changing Journey With the Curable App)
https://www.curablehealth.com/podcast/man-down (Minisode: Man Down)

If you like these, you can also subscribe on iTunes (and leave us a review if you're feeling generous!)... I'm working on more to come soon --> https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/like-mind-like-body/id1265323809?mt=2 (Like Mind, Like Body by Curable: The program for chronic pain recovery on Apple Podcasts)