A Tribute to Dr. John Sarno
At age 89, Dr. John Sarno has retired from his clinical practice at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University School of Medicine where he is a professor of rehabilitation medicine. I consider John a friend, a thought-creator in the field of mind body medicine, and someone to whom I owe a profound debt of gratitude in that my wife, Suzanne, was cured of seven years of debilitating back pain by embracing the etiology of her pain as psychologically based.
Dr. Sarno developed his theory — Tension Myositis Syndrome — after more than a decade in practice as a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician in academic medicine. He observed patterns of behavior and personality traits that were shared by large numbers of patients with back pain and other pain syndromes.
Dr. Sarno’s controversial approach to back pain, other types of chronic musculoskeletal pain — neck, shoulder, infrascapular — and other pain syndromes including migraine and carpal tunnel syndrome, is a two-part lecture to educate patients on the underlying psychological causes or triggers leading to mild oxygen deprivation to certain muscle groups. His mantra is, “The pain is real, but the cause of your pain is not.”
John has successfully treated over 12,000 patients and has helped countless others who have read one of his four books —"The Mind-Body Connection" — or who have been treated by a handful of Sarno disciples. A criticism of Sarno’s self-reported success rate of greater than 95% is selection bias. It is true that Dr. Sarno would not take as a patient someone who was unwilling to accept that his/her pain might be psychologically based. That said, I argue that John was ahead of his time — utilizing individualized medicine.
Thank you, John.
Steven R. Peskin, MD, MBA, FACP, is associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey — Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
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Comments
Dr. John Sarno is certainly worth a tribute
Thank you for this tribute -- like your wife, I too benefited greatly from Dr. Sarno's work. Using his books, I fully recovered from my chronic back pain and even more incredibly, from the Crohn's disease which my doctors had told me was incurable.
On a side note, I was a bit concerned by your paragraph which seemed to acknowledge that Dr. Sarno may have benefited from "selection bias", and I'd like to offer a counterargument. (If I misconstrued your statement, please disregard.) In his book "The Divided Mind", Sarno states:
"Because acceptance of the diagnosis is essential (Brian: I would have used the word "critical") for a positive outcome and because so few people are open to such a diagnosis, I have a telephone conversation with all who call for an appointment. After years of experience it is not difficult to determine whether someone is a good candidate for the program and for those who are not it is a kindness to them and to me to discourage them from making an appointment. This is not discriminatory but simply faces the reality of what is required for successful treatment. It is analogous to a surgeon's decision not to operate on someone who is not a good surgical risk." (page 134)
In other words, if a patient says in advance that they probably wouldn't take "the pill" as prescribed, then the chances of successful treatment are greatly reduced, if not eliminated, and it would do little good for someone to prescribe it for them. That's a failing of the patient, not the treatment.
Secondly, I offer an excerpt from "The Great Pain Deception", authored by former Sarno patient Steven Ray Ozanich:
"The most absurd reaction I've heard from other physicians regarding Dr. Sarno and TMS is that he screens his patients -- looking for "easy cures" -- so that his success rate will be higher. There are few things in this world that could be further from the truth than that argument .... These TMS physicians are seeing the hardest, most difficult cases -- the ones other physicians cannot help. Sufferers only go to see TMS practitioners when they have tried everything -- and are at the end of their ropes." (pages 120-121)
Well said, and a fact also echoed by TMS physician (and author) Marc Sopher on that very same page spread. Dr. Sarno's approach seemed incredibly silly to me as well when I first saw it. It was only a couple years later that my symptoms reached the point where I finally became desperate enough to try it, and it worked where so many treatments had failed to work very well.
Thank you, Dr. Peskin, for this excellent piece. Like you said, John Sarno is ahead of his time.
An additional tribue to Dr. John E. Sarno
To follow Dr. Peskin's tribute, I want to express my gratitude to Dr. Sarno for the opportunity to work closely with him, as a psychoanalyst colleague, since 1979.
He has been an inspiring pioneer in the field of mindbody medicine, particularly in treating pain. His legacy is being acknowledged by people around the world on the website:
www.thankyoudrsarno.org The people who created the ThankDrSarno Project website had previously created a website of resources for people in pain: http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/The_Tension_Myositis_Syndrome_Wiki.
Physicians, mental health clinicians, and patient healthcare advocates, influenced by Dr. Sarno's work, formed a non-profit educational corporation, Psychophysiologic Disorders Association (PPDA), incorporated in 2011: www.ppdassociation.org.
In a groundbreaking collaboration between physicians and psychoanalytic clinicians, the PPDA is co-sponsoring, with the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, a conference, WHEN STRESS CAUSES PAIN, on October 6, 2012. This conference will be held at the New York Academy of Medicine: http://www.ppdassociation.org/events/when-stress-causes-pain Registration for the conference is now open.
We hope that this conference will sustain and expand Dr. Sarno's contribution to this growing field.