I've posted some stuff in the past about back pain, particularly looking at TMS - the pain being real but a physical manifestation of something going on psychologically. Your mind creating real pain in your body to distract you from subconscious worries and anger and other emotions. Your mind is giving you real physical pain to distract you from what is really stressing you....
My interviews with Monte and Adam explain this all in more detail.
Then I was at that workshop with mc last week and she was talking about how the body reacts unconsciously to threat....health is about threat modulation....Emotions effecting, causing something physical.....now something physical can affect emotions.....
Things connect...that there are emotional factors at play, even at an unconscious level.
In my interview with Frank Forencich he alluded to something similar:
mc has discussed back pain more in a new post:
Thoughts on Low Back Pain
My interviews with Monte and Adam explain this all in more detail.
Then I was at that workshop with mc last week and she was talking about how the body reacts unconsciously to threat....health is about threat modulation....Emotions effecting, causing something physical.....now something physical can affect emotions.....
Things connect...that there are emotional factors at play, even at an unconscious level.
In my interview with Frank Forencich he alluded to something similar:
Depression is epidemic. The World Health Organization forecasts that, by 2020, “depression will be second only to heart disease in terms of disability or disease burden.”
To me, this is even more shocking than our epidemics of heart disease, obesity and diabetes. This is a disease state that’s psychospiritual as well as physical. There are many explanations, but I like the work of Kelly Lambert. She’s a neuroscientist who’s traced reward centers in the brain. She’s discovered a strong association between areas that coordinate movement and those that deliver a sense of satisfaction. I call this “the ancestral reward system.”
mc has discussed back pain more in a new post:
Thoughts on Low Back Pain
The big take away seems to be that especially chronic low back pain is frequently not about the joints - pain is way more interesting and intriguing it seems than that, but it does make sense that the low back is where so much chronic pain gets filtered.
Comments
The strange thing is that last monday I was feeling a little bit down, it was a holiday and there was nothing to do at home so I was feeling pretty bored and miserable and my back pain came back.
I even mentioned to my girlfriend because it was just another "bad" thing to add to the depression and it seemed weird because I hadn't felt pain in weeks.
Reading your post now it makes sense that the pain came directly from the emotional state.
What does a normal spine look like then?
Anyway, if it is out of shape, what is causing that? It is being pulled out of shape by the muscles. What is causing the muscles to be pulling out of position?
I don't think it is either/or.
Of course there can be pathology causing pain - disc degeneration or whatever.
However for so many people with back pain there is no clear pathology and doctors can find nothing wrong...the pain comes and goes and moves around. I believe much of it is psychological. Sarno also has accounts of people whose pathology indicates degeneration ruptured disc etc and who have no symptoms.
Sometimes the emotional solution does solve the problem - relaxing the muscles will change posture.
I can respect that, but by the same token let's understand what our colleagues in the medical profession look for when reading films: pathology such as fracture, dislocation, mass or infection. What we DC's call subluxation, (a bone out of place that causes nerve interference) MD's (including my buddy the spinal pain specialist)refer to as "spinal pain without radiographic evidence". They simply do not consider the weight bearing position of the lumbar spine..why would they? That's not their job. That doesn't mean the pain is idiopathic, psychosomatic, or imaginary. It's insensitive and just plain wrong to tell a patient suffering with mechanical back pain that "It's all in your head"
The TMS docs have quite a bit of evidence that people in pain or painfree quite often have the same looking pathology. I know in my case I was diagnosed with curvature of spine, degenerated disc and pinched nerve. This was well over 10 years ago. I reversed all of my symptoms by treating the cause as psychological while stopping any physical treatment/therapy aimed at fixing my body parts.
If I were to go back today for an mri I would still have a crooked spine and degenerated disc even though I have been painfree for 9 years now.
What most medical professionals don't get is the complete cause of pain being oxygen deprivation and how powerful the pain/distraction strategy is in these disorders. For example someone with TMS but on the fence and having some doubt would be totally set back by reading that it can't be fixed by simply addressing the psychological.
And it is not about being happy...it is about communicating more open, allowing, aligned and balanced behavior and thought energy to our nervous system. Our nervous system takes whatever we give it and processes it. If we give it closed-off, tight, unflexible energy (via thoughts/behaviors/attitiudes) then we get that effect in our body
(restricted blood vessel walls) means lack of oxygen to muscle and nerve tissue. When we make the adjustment to be more open this is communicated to our nervous system and then to our body. Cause and effect processed automatically through our autonomic nervous system.
Monte Hueftle
www.runningpain.com
Since giving up gluten a few months ago, my pain and tightness has all but disappeared. I just have some lingering tightness in my ribcage.