Terrific 2009 interview with Dr. Sarno

This is a really really good resource. Thanks so much for posting it!

 

Dr. Sarno's summary of his TMS theory is stated so succinctly in this brief interview that it serves as a perfect introduction for patients who are experiencing mind-body symptoms and who need a simplified description of the psychological reasons behind them. I realize that Freud's theories of frightening emotions repressed in the unconscious are unfashionable today with the behavioral psychologists and their theories of secondary gain, but Dr. Sarno is so obviously right about the origins of the epidemic of psychogenic pain syndromes in Westernized societies that it's impossible to deny his thesis because it is the simplest of all explanations possible. Real science like Occam's razor!1 All the other structural explanations rely too much on conjectural connections between our anatomies and the development of chronic pain. In this video, the way Dr. Sarno deconstructs the interviewer's shoulder pain and CTS is simply devastating. How can the chiros, PTs and orthopedic surgeons keep dishing out their respective lines of BS? I would conjecture all they are doing is feeding the basic repressive processes in the brain that lead to the generation of TMS symptoms, telling the mind what it already wants to believe.

1 Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor, Latin lex parsimoniae) is the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

 

I love it. This is a great introduction for all our new members from the Good Dr. himself. Dr. Sarno
Bless You