Question

Hi,

Many people get a severe back pain immediately after bending and lifting something heavy.
Is this also TMS or a 'real' injury?

 

It depends. It happens that you have back pain etc. when you lifted something or had an accident. Usually this heals within due time. When I worked a whole day in the garden I will feel my back the next day. And then it is gone. But, TMS is whenever you engage in an activity your back starts to hurt (which it normally won’t do) or if back pain doesn’t clear up after some time and becomes chronic. So, not all back pain is TMS, there are also structural causes for back pain. You can read about this in one of the books of Dr. Sarno or Dr. Hanscom.

 

I 100% agree with Time2Be. Per Steve Ozanich:

MORE: https://www.thrivinglaunch.com/stop-pain-steve-ozanich/ (Stop Pain - Steve Ozanich - Thriving Launch Podcast)

In addition to many back problems, this goes for lots of other things. I was reading about anti-depressant withdrawal and how some people continue to have chronic symptoms even after their serotonin receptors are working normally again, how football players can "feel" injuries that healed decades ago, how whiplash is frequently chronic in some countries but not others, the "chronic" Lyme disease example Steve gave, etc. This is all TMS. Very few things are permanent in life. And that's why diagnoses of central sensitization, neural pathways, etc. are all the same and nothing more than TMS.

That's why health forums are such a dangerous place to be. There are tons of people convincing each other that what they're experiencing is "permanent" with no room to improve. More often than not, that is not case. But everyone feeds off one another, further revving up the nervous system and convincing the brain that something is terribly wrong. Fibromyalgia and back pain forums are great examples of this.

 

In medieval times rats and flies both appeared around trash.... so rats and flies must come from trash?

If you get to a point where you stop reviewing the information available and start watching what is really happening you will know that virtually everyone who 'hurts' themselves via tms ,which is the majority of cases I have observed, had a pressing need for symptoms and the event was merely a trigger.

People always call me when they are moving. I am strong and I own a van. Inevitably a lot of them 'hurt' themselves lifting something....while they are in the middle of a move, their spouse is micro managing and ill prepared, a loathed family member like an in-law is over helping and they are moving to a new space they can barely afford that will necessitate them maintaining an income level that will leave them even less time for recreation....
.... perhaps their marriage is on shaky ground anyway... they might hate that job. Regardless after their injury they will be told they pulled,herniated or inflamed something... it will either become chronic or recurring.

Did it really come from lifting something? This is not an exception... it is the rule.

 

So true, Baseball! I always ask people what was going on in their lives when the symptoms developed. "TMS" means nothing more than symptoms caused by strong emotions, whether that's fear, anger, depression, etc. These symptoms are happening for a reason and as a response to those emotions.

 

I'd add that on some occasions it's hard to tell whether a pain is a physical injury or TMS...but most of the time it honestly doesn't matter. Simple muscle strains and sprains heal in a matter of weeks, and TMS isn't permanent either. Both will go away in due time. If you lift a heavy object and happen to ACTUALLY pull a muscle in your back, it will heal. If you lift a heavy object and it triggers TMS, this will also "heal" in time. In neither case should you be in chronic pain. I've definitely had times where I wasn't sure which it was, but it was obviously nothing life-threatening and I try not to worry too much and let it pass, being gentle with myself in the meantime.

 

I've never heard this question before because the answer seems so obvious, but it could just be a drive by question.

It's almost never an injury but if it is it hurts right away. And as a true injury with damage it will "begin to heal" immediately because the body wants to be healed in its natural state of being. A TMS event will often come on slowly over the next few hours and days, increasing along, and then of course lingers like a politician at a fundraiser for as much time as needed, if the mind needs to complain and divert. However, a TMS event can also strike immediately as the object is being lifted which makes many people believe it is not TMS but rather a true injury, but it is still TMS. Isn't an injury simply the body being angered? The lines blur into one...

But the suffering of course compounds when the doctors enter the scene. They see the images and voila, they point to something non causal and make it worse. I've seen people heal quickly from ruptured fragmented broken off discs, as well as sequestered (fluid ruptured out) discs even after a "mindbody doc" told them it needed surgery. They had TMS. The body is rarely if ever the cause, but of course it can become injured.

So this question like many basic questions can be of help.

SteveO

 

In one of Dr. Sarno's interviews (can be found on YouTube) the woman interviewing him asked him if the sore back she had the day after she worked in her garden was TMS, and he said yes it was. Just thought I'd share this anecdote as it seemed relevant to the discussion.

 

Oh, here goes my hypothesis ‘garden work = normal with a bit back pain the day after’ down the drain ...

 

HA...I can’t say for sure, but Dr. Sarno was pretty confident that residual pain from relatively low impact activities was simply a conditioned response. It would be a great experiment (probably not logically possible for many reasons) to do your gardening every day for a month straight. I’m willing to bet by the end of that month, you either have much less pain the next day or no pain at all. That’s based on my own experience with exercise. It used to be that I would be very stiff and uncomfortable the rest of the day following a work out, but these days, I’m loose after a workout and feeling even better the next day.

 

Good ideal, gardening every day for a month! I don’t have time for that. Anyway, I think there is truth in what Dr. Sarno says and your experience is also in this direction. If physical activities gives you really bad muscle pain etc. you are simply not relaxed enough. Let’s see if I can experiment a bit ...

 

chessplayr and Time2be
You're welcomed to come to my garden and conduct your experiment here. I'll even feed you lunch.
Lainey

 

Ha!!!

 

I wish I could heal my other stuff as easily as I did/can back pain. I was a book cure from just reading Sarno and Schubiner...literally months of non-stop pain gone by the end of the former's book with some sporadic flares after, and after reading the latter's book became able to not just avoid constant back pain, but shut off the once a year or so flares withon minutes to hours by just saying "oh come on....you didn't hurt yourself...this is TMS" and moving on. Sometimes the flares happened when lifting a box or something I thought before hand "I hope I don't get hurt"...primed for the "injury"...sometimes they happened when sitting still doing nothing. For me the key either way was knowing that I couldn't have possibly hurt myself with those activities. The body isn't bulletproof but it's not a fragile doll either...and mine has been very beat up and cut up by surgery. Unless you have some disease you'd clearly know about like Osteogenesis Imperfecta etc/ or had surgery last week with pins still healing etc, or something else so extreme, you just cannot damage your back doing normal things like carrying groceries. You cannot become disabled from bending down normally or twisting to look out of a window...it doesn't happen. Not everything in TMS is this clear and obvious, but it was instrumental in me believing in it at all and I wish I could find a way to KNOW that about some other symptoms since that seems key to progress.