EXCERPT-Unlearn Your Pain

Chapter 1

 

 The Truth About Your Pain

 Telling people about Mind Body Syndrome is like telling them

that the earth is round, when they KNOW that it’s flat!

" Anonymous patient

 

Vitiant artus aegrae contagia mentis.

(When the mind is ill at ease, the body is affected.) " Ovid

 

It hurts.

 

Your pain is awful. Your misery is unrelenting. No matter what you do, you can’t get rid of it.

You went to your doctor, and he told you that you had a medical condition: degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, whiplash, or something else. Your doctor prescribed drugs. You took them, but they didn’t really help. Maybe you even had surgery, but that didn’t stop the pain, whether it was in your back, your head, your neck, your gut, or all over.

Perhaps you have explored alternative medicine. Maybe you took herbal remedies, had

therapeutic massages, or saw a chiropractor. You’re considering acupuncture, hypnosis, and even crystals, if that might help. Some of these treatments may have provided temporary or partial relief, but still the pain is there, day after day after day. You’ve gone to so many health

 

practitioners that you are starting to feel no one can help you because no one understands the real problem. Maybe your doctor even referred you to a psychiatrist or psychologist, suggesting that your pain isn’t real"that it’s all in your head.

But you know you’re not imagining your pain. You’re not faking it to gain attention or sympathy. It’s about time someone in the medical profession recognized that the pain in your body is real. It’s about time that someone in the medical profession told you that there is a reason for your pain and a way to cure it.

I am that doctor, and I’m telling you: Your pain is real, there is a reason for it, and there is a cure for it. The only way to relieve the pain is to find the underlying cause of it, to get to the bottom of it. The problem is not in your head. It’s in your diagnosis.

 

Some doctors may say you have a serious medical condition, but if they don’t know how

to cure it, their diagnosis doesn’t help you. Perhaps alternative health practitioners will tell you

that your spine is not properly aligned or your aura is out of whack or your chi is diminished. All of these are different ways of looking at your body, but none of them will succeed if they’re not correctly diagnosing why your body hurts.

 

I have some good news for you. Unless you have a medical problem resulting in clear

pathology in your body (which can be determined by routine medical tests), your pain can be cured. Following this program, you can take some relatively easy steps to vanquish it.

 

Like tens of millions of Americans and countless others around the globe who suffer from chronic back pain, muscle pain, headaches, migraines, stomach pain, and other misdiagnosed conditions, you’re hurting because of overly sensitized nerve connections between the brain and the body. These connections have created a vicious cycle of pain that can last for months, years, or even decades unless you do what it takes to stop it. This cycle of pain signals has been “learned” by your nervous system"and the longer these signals keep firing, the more sensitized and overactive the nerves become, and the more pain you feel.

 

The event that started this horrible pain cycle could have been an injury or a stressful event in your life, or it could have come out of the blue. A very careful and detailed look at your

current situation and your life history will reveal how your brain is amplifying this pain and perpetuating the vicious cycle.

 

 

The best news is that you don't have to live the rest of your life with this pain. Whether you’ve had it for a few weeks or for many years, it can be beaten. Just as your nervous system has learned to make your body hurt, you can use your brain to unlearn the pain. There’s a way to retrain your brain so that your body isn’t contorted into pain. This book will explain how this can be done without drugs or surgery, by anyone with the motivation to do so.

 

In fact, if you begin to understand this syndrome and recognize what causes it, you've already taken a powerful first step. And the rest of the steps, though they require wholehearted commitment, are not difficult. They are all explained in this book, and the whole program is laid out for you to work through. Improvement may occur within days or weeks, even if you’ve been suffering for a long time. And by doing the program you can get more than temporary or partial relief. You can achieve complete freedom from the pain and distress that have hobbled you.

 

Starting today, you can break the connection between your nervous system and your physical pain. And you can start to use your mental energy to overcome your limitations and rebuild your life. I know this is true because I have done it myself. I’ve changed my understanding of the source of my pain, and I can now prevent the stresses of everyday life from producing pain in my body. More importantly, I’ve seen the same transformation in hundreds of my patients.

This program is not risky or far out. It doesn’t require belief in an alternative paradigm of medicine or philosophy. The work of unlearning your pain is based on solid science and common sense.