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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