Muscle spasm

I have just been diagnosed with TMS so started reading Dr. Sarno's book "Healing back pain" but I got confused.

In chapter, the physiology of tms, Dr. Sarno stated the following:
" Muscle spasm is the first and most dramatic. It is responsible for the excruciating pain that people experience when they are having an acute attack, as described in the first chapter. However, once the attack has passed the muscle is not in spasm. In the thousands of patients I have examined through the years I have
rarely found the involved muscles to be in spasm."

Does he mean that muscle spasm is not one of the symptoms of TMS as he stated that he rarely found muscle spasm with the diagnosed patients?

THANKS

 

Dr. Howard Schubiner, MD describes this as the acute vs. chronic phases of injury and pain. Someone might, indeed, have suffered a muscle spasm - for example, when I whiplashed myself (including a fractured C6 vertebra) in a high-speed skiing accident in 1983. The muscles went into spasm, which I believe is what they are designed to do in order to protect the fracture. Everything healed within 8 weeks plus another 4 weeks of stiffness, 100% as expected.

Ten years later I started having debilitating "neck spasms" which continued until 2010, when I worked with a cranio-sacral doctor who told me to "talk" to my atlas-occipital joint and gently stroke it back into place. That was a year before I discovered Dr. Sarno, so I didn't really understand the big picture, but the "talking and stroking" totally worked and I never had another neck spasm after that and never saw my chiropractor of, yikes, almost 20 years, after that!

So to reiterate: acute injury in 1983, related to a fractured neck bone (it was a very simple fracture, no big deal)(seriously). It healed in the normal number of weeks, as expected. I started to have frequent spasms and pain in my neck ten years later which lasted for almost another twenty years - but there was no new injury, so it was chronic pain. Obviously, the cause of the chronic phase was TMS, because a simple mindfulness exercise banished it immediately. After I discovered Dr. Sarno a year later and "did the work" (I did the SEP) it was banished permanently.

Dr. Schubiner was recently interviewed and talks about this on The Mind & Fitness Podcast with Eddy Lindenstein - episode #85 on August 28. Highly recommended.