Could you please elaborate on the conference, like on some of the details, where was it held, how many attended, were they TMS practitioners or patients predominately? Did the presenters discuss their own TMS encounters, do they still get them, what do they do if they have a debilitating TMS attack? What they do after the meetings, Starbucks, hit the bar--that sort of stuff?
Sure! So the course was called Beyond Pain Management, held at St. John Providence hospital in Southfield, Michigan (just outside Detroit). I believe another will be held in California next year.
There were about 75 people there, mostly practitioners, though likely all of us had our own TMS experiences as patients too. Many were people like myself who either had learned of TMS through personal experience reading Sarno and others and wanting to incorporate it better into their practice. It was wonderful to meet so many other people enthusiastic about a mindbody approach. There were a couple other physical and occupational therapists, a lot of MDs and nurse practitioners and mental health professionals. I also met some other professionals like an acupuncturist, yoga teachers and others. Some people worked in the St. John hospital system and were learning of TMS for the first time, or had heard a bit about Dr. Schubiner and wanted to learn more.
Dr. Schubiner and Alan Gordon did discuss their own personal TMS encounters, Alan Gordon said at one point he had like 20 different diagnoses (before he learned of TMS). TMS was discussed as being basically a universal experience that everyone still gets, though they didn't specifically talk about their own experiences getting it in recent years.
The basic strategy discussed for managing a TMS attack is first to establish that it is indeed TMS with a doctors visit if needed to rule out pathology, then to do a mixture of things that you guys probably already know a lot about. These included distraction/relaxing/hitting the bar or other fun activities, journaling if needed to figure out what underlying emotions might have contributed to the TMS attack, mindfulness/insight meditation, re-framing the pain as simply a non-harmful sensation while it is still occurring. There was discussion of how to present things to clients in a supportive way, how to work with painful emotions, how to help people access their emotions and manage them.
The theme of the conference seemed to be "stretching professionally", in other words, becoming more comfortable with the idea that medical professionals can work with client's emotions and that mental health professionals can help do a basic screen to help rule in/out TMS as the cause of pain.
