Hip Pain

Before I get to my question/dilemma, here is a rundown of my TMS experience.

I’ve been an avid weight lifter/body builder and runner most of my life. In my late 20s, I noticed that I started have limited range of motion in both of my hips which I attributed to poor flexibility and my body structure. I didn’t notice any pain unless I really forced my hips to internally or externally rotate, so I avoided activities that required this. In my mid-30s, I decided to try out the Insanity workout, which is a very high intensity and high impact workout. Over the course of doing Insanity, I started to notice a lot more loss of flexibility in my hips and some pain (burning) even when I was sedentary.

In 2015, my medical provider ordered x-rays of my hips. I was told that my hips looked like a 75 year old’s due to osteoarthritis. I had a lot of bone spurs and very thin cartilage in both hips and was told by an orthopedic surgeon that I was a candidate for total hip replacement (THR). The surgeon suspected congenital hip dysplasia as the reason for the accelerated hip degeneration.

Before going through surgery, I tried a cortisone injection in the most deteriorated hip (left) and a few different prescription anti-inflammatory medications. The cortisone injection had zero effect on my hip pain, but the anti-inflammatories seemed to help.

As I was contemplating a THR, I started having significant issues with lower back spasms/pain. My orthopedic surgeon sent me to a back specialist to rule out the possibility that my back was exacerbating my hip pain. The back specialist said my back looked okay except for some normal age related osteoarthritis and a couple ruptured/bulging disks. The back spasms/pain proved to be far more debilitating than the hip pain and I ended up getting a cortisone injection in my lower back which seemed to help. When I returned to my orthopedic surgeon he decided that the back issues were probably not causing my hip pain and said that the next step was a THR.

Eventually, I decided to get my left hip replaced. After surgery my left hip pain was gone and my range of motion was better than I had ever remembered (and still is). However, during my recovery from hip surgery I kept having issues with my low back and I eliminated all exercises that might aggravate my back.
Earlier this year, I decided to test out my back and did some straight legged deadlifts with very light weight. To those who have never lifted weights, the motion is very similar to bending at the waist to touch your toes. My back immediately went into spasm when I did the lift, and I was laid up for several days. During my recovery from this low back episode I decided to check out Healing Back Pain because I had heard Dr. Sarno’s name mentioned several times on the Howard Stern Show. I had downloaded the book on Audible several months prior, but never got around to listening to it. I started listening to parts of it every day, and slowly my low back pain disappeared. I now do squats and deadlifts with over 300 lbs with no back issues. I am also considering following through with one of the goals I had when I was in my 20s; competing in a bodybuilding competition.

Here is my dilemma: My right hip (the one that I didn’t have surgery on) is starting to have significant pain when I do squats and deadlifts and seems to be getting worse. The pain primarily occurs when I bring my hips forward at the end of the lift. I want to believe that this is simply the symptom imperative and that my pain is TMS, but I am not so sure. It doesn't help that in Healing Back Pain, Dr. Sarno mentions that some osteoarthritic hip joints can be painful. I plan on going to see my orthopedic surgeon again to find out if my hip degeneration has gotten worse over the past 2 years, especially since I am able to and have been doing exercises like squats and deadlifts (thanks to no back pain). I know my story might be a little unique, but has anyone else with significant hip degeneration (as seen on x-ray) been able to overcome the pain by simply treating it as TMS?

 

When it comes to hips, you might try reading some of the post by Tennistom ... or you could try sending him a message...

 

Hello BSUBroncoDad,
I wonder if you solved your hip pain mystery? I too had both my hips replaced and I'm trying hard to believe the Body-Mind theory but there are many contradictions all around. Most say that you won't have physical damages if it's of psychosomatic source but my hips cartilage + femoral heads were both getting destroyed. And it wasn't just on X-Ray pictures, I could HEAR my hips grinding and scratching at every move. I wish it would all originate from my head really but after 12 years of sickness and 3-4 body-mind coaches, I'm getting very skeptical... still reading and trying though...

 

My beloved coach was diagnosed with HOLES in her hips. She has several several on a knee surgeries and she realized there was something else going on when the hip started to be painful. She embraced a mind body connection (she also did physical work), and became pain free.
After this she developed some more mind/body symptoms and dove deeper into the work.
Mind/Body coaches don’t heal you, YOU can heal you.. and what that healing looks like varies.
Have you seen the movie Love Heals? The subject of the film became a patient of Dr. Hanscom’s after failed back surgery. Her story is about emotional healing, and what brought on the initial pain. It’s unknown if she will be completely out of pain, but she needed to learn (and continues learning) how to totally support herself and live with where she is at right now.
The story is remarkably encouraging. She did not follow what is considered a classic tms way of healing, but has forged her own path and it helped her uncover some long hidden memories that were traumatic
https://lovehealsfilm.com/ (LOVE HEALS Film | Documentary about self-healing)

 

Our bodies make all kinds of noises, and we project onto those noises what we THINK or VISUALIZE may be causing it - when in reality it is just normal noises.

Find my thread about hip pain, I had surgery (for FAI and labral tear) and it was all just TMS all along.

 

I understand all that... but physic you know... can you fly? Can you NOT die? Do you bleed when you cut yourself? I mean, at some point you have to be very careful not to be delusional/in denial of reality.

 

Your comparing noises your body makes to flying and dying and bleeding? That's a pretty big leap. Best of luck to you.

 

Good point. And indeed the hips surgery was very succesful in my case and zero hip pain since then. One thing that is underrated and not talked enough is heavy metals. A child with mercury amalgams can have serious health problem at a very young age. True story for my niece... and probably true for myself. But in the Mind/Body circle a lot of people think that everything is psychosomatic, like you could drink 2L of mercury without consequences. It's frustrating and dangerous thinking.

Sorry if it seems out of nowhere and thanks for your help.

 

To clarify, I agree that we just need to use common sense to determine the difference in these situations. But in reference to your specific comment, there are several mentions in the various TMS books (like Sarno's, or Steve Ozanich, etc) where the patient exclaims "but my knees make NOISE" (or insert hip, wrist, shoulder, etc) and use that as their evidence that there is a structural issue. Noise can often just be fluid being displace...fluid being the result of inflammation...inflammation being the result of injury-repair in the short term, but in the LONG term inflammation can definitely be stress/TMS related.

 

My Hip clicked LOUDLY on virtually every sit-up I ever did for 20 years until I read Sarno..when I stopped caring about the noises because I knew they were harmless, the noise stopped? My knee also clicked and swelled up terribly...and then After I realized it was TMS, I also realized i had never looked at my knees until they hurt..they ALWAYS look like that because I have been crawling around on them for 57 years.


You have to be pretty beaten up to open up to this way of thinking. My only friends who had hip replacement had to have it because of serious motorcycle accidents. Neither of them were ever 100% again and one died very young due to 'Probably' Morphine addiction (they found his body too late to properly autopsy)

The frequency which with the purveyors of the "Medieval Medical Model" as Sarno calls it, throw out major surgeries as solutions to normal aging is astounding...that is why it is very rare to hear of someone who has only had ONE surgery... there's always an 'adjustment', a 'misdiagnoses' and then ...your hooked!

The good news is even after these powerful placebos, one can still recover from TMS. My friends wife had her whole lower spine shattered in a rad car accident...she was in pain after operation number 6 and 7 of inserting discs, metal etc....she read HBP and never went back for more...

But she was pretty tired of the system.
So was I.

 

Thank you for your input, it's interesting.

I have Ankylosing Spondylitis and once one of my many Mind/Body coach asked me to read Healing Back Pain and report back... I noted so many differences between TMS and AS that I was even more skeptical after reading the book!

For example (checking my notes...) he was saying that "Rhumatoid arthritis is an enterely different matter" (p.129), there was no inflammation (p. 28, p. 151), that TMS people didn't have structural damage, etc. I seriously don't know how people suffering from AS, a condition very similar to Rhumathoid Arthritis, with sky-high inflammation, structural damages (bamboo spine, bones fusion, etc) could ever be convinced reading something like that. I don't know, it's maybe the proof that for SOME people it is a psychosomatic thing and for SOME it is NOT.

I wouldn't make the mistake of puting everyone in the same basket though.

The jury is still out...

 

Thanks for the caution. I'll pass, but you are perfectly entitled to your beliefs you came here with...But this is a TMS forum so it begs the question, why are you here? To prove to us that you're an exception to a rule? To tell us to be careful?

https://www.healthboards.com/ (HealthBoards Message Boards)

There's a forum where you can go and find virtually everything you're discussing AND be happy to find that any mention of Sarno or MindBody issues will get you kicked off...You may prefer it to this forum. We're all wacko's who believe that the mind/unconscious can cause ANY kind of health issue and have found the real issues, of which you are warning us to be careful, only cause hellish catastrophising and permanent disability.

 

I have my doubts, I told you why and you tell me to go "f*ck off". Very helpful thanks.
And I shall remind you that I never ever asked you for anything. I asked a question to a specific person. I don't want to prove anything to anyone, I would just like a little bit more humility.