Dr. John Sarno—another pain healer

Dr Sarno, a rehabilitation-medicine specialist at NYU, died last year. I’ve written about him before, but his story bears repeating. He had an unconventional approach for dealing with back pain that made him the laughing stock among his peers. Because he had been seeing a therapist to determine whether his own ailments might have a psychological component, he started asking his patients about their histories. He began to discover that his patients’ psychic health was a major contributor to their pain.

Sam Dolnick, the assistant managing editor of the New York Times, wrote a tribute to Sarno in the Times Magazine in which he states that Sarno came to believe that “the body was using physical pain to defend itself from mental anguish….Your back doesn’t hurt because you lifted that heavy suitcase; your back hurts because you’re smoldering with unacknowledged rage that your sister, who always got away with everything, still hasn’t repaid that loan you couldn’t afford to give her in the first place.”

Dolnick is a believer: “Some 15 years ago, when I was in my 20s, I had terrible back pain, and an eminent doctor recommended that I have spinal surgery. On a relative’s recommendation, I went to see Sarno for a second opinion. Limping into his office, I found a tiny, owlish man sitting behind a giant wooden desk. …He asked why I had come to see him, and I described my problems with my back and then with my life. He was kind and inquisitive but firm. He had seen people like me before. There’s nothing wrong with you, he said. Don’t have surgery. Stop acting sick. Your back is fine, and so are you.

He gave me his book, and I watched his videos (they have the distinct feel of public-access TV), but mostly I tried to stop treating myself like an invalid. I threw away the back braces, started playing basketball again and watched, amazed, as the pain gradually went away.

I can’t say that I quite understand what happened with my back, but Sarno believed that I was suppressing a white-hot anger I could not articulate. Anger was always the most powerful emotion in Sarno’s cosmology, the root cause of the physical pain.”

Sarno had plenty of admirers, including Howard Stern, who dedicated his book to Sarno. You can read testimonials on the webpage thankyoudrsarno.com. They’re quite interesting. You can also look for a documentary about him, called “All the Rage.” Unfortunately, my search for it on my TV search function has not yielded results.

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Charlie the healer

The woman who cuts my hair told me about a TV show called The Healer. The show features an unassuming and handsome young man from Australia named Charlie Goldsmith. In the show, he goes to the homes of people in pain and, in all the cases I saw, makes their pain go away—without charge. He does this by talking to them a bit about their problem, sitting next to them, then either holding his hand near the pain site or merely thinking about the pain site. It takes seconds. His eyes are closed and his eyelids flutter. In case you think this is just the placebo effect, I saw him assuage the pain of a two-year-old with multiple genetic problems.

Charlie says he became aware of this capability at age 18 when he was at a camp. In the dining hall, as he reached for his knife and fork, his hands came together as if pulled by a magnet. He turned to the woman next to him and asked her to hold her hand near his, and she remarked about how strange it felt. Another woman came over and put her hand up to his. Without touching it, he says he was aware of a lump and, without thinking, began focusing on the lump, which seemed to disappear. Afterward, the woman reported that for the first time in four years she was able to bend her finger.

He wants to be studied, but has had an extremely difficult time getting medical people to test him. He did manage to get the Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn to give him a try. Doctors enrolled 32 patients who were not responding to pain medication. They had all manner of illnesses, including kidney stones, prostate cancer, an inflamed gall bladder, and much more. Seventy-six percent of the patients reported "marked improvement." As one of the physicians remarked, “You could see the shift in a patient's status from stagnant to a rapid healing resolution. I can't quantify it, but I would say Charlie cut days off patients' hospital stays. Watching him work has been humbling in the most extreme way."

For more about Charlie, watch the TV show (TLC channel) and read the article I found in Elle magazine. Fascinating stuff.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Whole wheat bread—no better than white

We have been led to believe that whole wheat bread is better for us than white bread. Well, it isn’t, at least according to Nathan Myhrvold. Myhrvold used to be the Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. After leaving that company, he became interested in food science (among other things) and has spent the last 15 years enmeshed in the study of food. I would trust this guy. He holds a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics from Princeton University, did postdoctoral work with Stephen Hawking, and also acquired a culinary diploma from École de Cuisine La Varenne, in France. He has created a scientific test kitchen that you can see in an entertaining TED talk. 

Anyhow, Myhrvold says there’s no evidence that whole grain breads are better for you than white bread and, in fact, there’s some “evidence to the contrary.” After sifting through 50 years of studies, his team found that all types of breads have pretty much the same result in your body. The theory has always been that the bran is the healthy part of the bread because it contains more fiber and vitamins. (In processing flour, the bran  is separated from the inner wheat kernel. With white bread, the bran is left out; with whole wheat bread, the bran is put back into the flour.)

 Myhrvold says that, when studied on a nutrient by nutrient basis, whole wheat bread would be slightly better because the bran contains manganese, phosophorus, and selenium, but that these components are “generally not important in the sense that they’re not things that most people run a deficit of.” Moreover, our bodies don’t absorb many of the vitamins and minerals in raw grain. Even worse, a compound in bran called phytates can actually bind to some of the potentially beneficially minerals to block absorption—it’s called the anti-nutrient effect.

The other supposed benefit of bran is that it causes the starch to break down more slowly, preventing sugar spike and delivering a longer, steadier flow of glucose into the body. Myhrvold’s response: because whole grain bread is only 11 percent bran, the effect on blood glucose is minimal.

OK. Now’s the perfect opportunity to mention a pet peeve of mine. At restaurants, wait-persons ask if you want white or wheat. “It’s all wheat, you ninny,” says snarky me to myself.

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Summing up 2017

This January starts my fourth year of blogging. I thought I might run out of material, but so far, that hasn’t happened.

This post sums up 2017. As to my own health, I’m in pretty good shape, and have still not had a check-up since my last one about 15 years ago. So I have no idea what my cholesterol level or other so-called health indicators are. I feel fine, give or take the aches and pains of old age. (Actually, on that measurement, I’m better, thanks to my efforts in improving my posture.)

What has stuck with me, however, are the health issues of people near and dear to me—all caused by adverse drug reactions. The first case is a friend who was hospitalized because of internal bleeding. She was so anemic she needed a blood transfusion. The cause? A combination of Plavix and aspirin, which the doctor prescribed to prevent stroke. Another friend spent several days in the hospital with a serious depletion of electrolytes. The cause? Diuretic medication, which the doctor prescribed for a bladder problem. Finally, my husband became seriously ill as a result of taking doctor-prescribed budesonide for colitis. The muscles in his hands, arms and legs felt so weak and painful he could hardly function. He wasn’t hospitalized but saw a number of doctors and underwent several tests. None of the doctors could diagnose the cause, yet none would consider budesonide being the culprit. But I have no doubt of it and found 374 FDA reports of “budesonide-related pain in extremity.” Of course, those were just the reported cases. It still makes me fume.

Adverse drug events (“harm experienced by a patient as a result of exposure to a medication”) account for nearly 700,000 emergency room visits and 100,000 hospitalizations each year. The most common of the problematic drugs are antidiabetic agents, such as insulin; anti-coagulant/blood thinner medications, such as warfarin, Plavix and aspirin; and, of course, opioids. Nearly one-third of adults in the US take five or more medications. 

Leave me out of it.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.