Book Thoughts: Healing Back Pain by John Sarno

For context: this book has an incredibly impassioned fan base who claim their debilitating back (or knee, or wrist) pain ended immediately by the power of this knowledge alone.

For example, a Seattle group dedicated to repetitive strain wrist injuries supposedly disbanded after reading the book and realizing their pain was all psychosomatic; Larry David supposedly said of his treatment (in a documentary I haven't watched) "it was the closest thing to a religious experience, and I wept."

What is the knowledge that produced these results? I know it's cliche to make fun of non-fiction books as mostly being three ideas repeated nineteen times each, but.... as best I can tell, there are literally only three ideas in this book:

• It might sound crazy but various kinds of physical pain, including back and joint pain but also headaches and stomach aches, might have no physical cause but rather be your body trying to distract you from emotional problems.
• Weirdly, just realizing this can make the pain go away. It's unclear why this would work, because your body was trying to distract you from the emotional pain and now you're aware of it, but somehow it often does.
• Meanwhile, lots of traditional doctor advice will make your pain worse by 1) reinforcing the distraction from the emotional pain, and 2) scaring you out of exercising, which is bad.

I think that's genuinely it, that's the whole book. And I am here for it! He is arguing against an assumption of Cartesian dualism – the mind and the body are entirely separate, so physical problems couldn't be caused by emotional ones – and from the tone of the book I gather that he really did have to argue this a lot against people who found it implausible.

But since I need zero additional convincing about the mind-body connection and its discontents, my reaction to his proposal is "sure that could be true, the only real question is whether it works empirically." And since lots of people seem to have semi-miraculous experiences with his methods, and since they're costless to implement and seems low-downside to try (assuming it doesn't stop you from getting other treatment you needed), I would say if you're in pain and find this intriguing I think it's worth a shot.

Still, I have to emphasize that as a book this thing is bad. It's not super long but it is so much longer than the content which I believe I faithfully summarized in 100 words above.

Again I give him some leeway because I guess he was arguing against assumptions that are no longer as prevalent, and maybe he was part of changing those assumptions to the point where his argument feels redundant, bitter-sweetly.

But if I had to pick one mega-gripe with the writing it's that he endlessly does that thing which so many non-fiction books written by experts do, where they've been told that giving examples is good, but a) they're trying to anonymize their case studies, and b) they fundamentally do not understand what makes case studies interesting and worthwhile, which is a combo of vivid details and new insights from each example.

As a result, this book is 50% composed of: "let me give you an example. A [young/old/milddle-aged] [man/woman/child] came to me with back pain. They had seen many other doctors for many years and had been told their pain was incurable, and that they would never [play tennis / go running / dance the tango in Argentina] again. However, after talking to me and learning about my methods, it turns out that their pain all stems from the trouble in their [work / marriage / torrid affair with an Argentinian tango dancer]. Now they have been pain free for 10 years and they tell me that it's all thanks to my methods."

The above is not exaggerated, except for that he never does anything as interesting as the Argentinian tango bit. I swear that not a single example added anything meaningfully different to my understanding than the 100 examples before, all of which are just variants of "this person had anxiety or anger from their work or home life, and their physical pain was actually just trapped emotional pain."

But maybe I'm being unfair: even if it's bad as writing, maybe that doesn't make it bad as a book? I believe in newsletters functioning as spaced repetition, maybe personal improvement books are the same: the repetition is the product, it relentlessly hammers the core idea into your brain until the idea actually sticks.

Legendary blogger Jehan suggests the correct approach here might be "keep reading until your back is fixed, then stop." I can support that.