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Notes -
There’s a recent pilot study that incorporated some of Sarno’s ideas, but only n=11 for the intervention: https://journals.lww.com/painrpts/Fulltext/2021/09000/Psychophysiologic_symptom_relief_therapy_for.13.aspx
Lead author is Professor at Harvard Medical School and an emergency medicine physician, so neither a crackpot nor someone biased toward psychogenic causation. Re: point 4: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23982421/
I find this John Stossell 20-20 report interesting, especially at 9:40, where John discusses back pain with his brother Tom. Both John and Tom Stossell suffered back pain together. John was cured by Sarno, but his brother Tom (a scientist) refuses to even consider the notion. We should be more like John and not Tom in openness to heterodox treatment possibilities. Especially in cases where the institutional bias is strongly against non-physical treatment (less money to be made, back pain physicians out of work and embarrassed, lost respect of medical establishment).
Humans have a long history of non-physical pain etiology, like for instance those caused by hysteria and demons. Consider the Psalms: For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. In this verse, the physical pain caused by sin (which entails social stress, obligation, and personal failure) is ameliorated by voicing one’s faults and pursuing a stress reduction strategy in the form of religion.
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