I Don't Believe in Arthritis -- Part 1

First of all, hi, I didn't post once in August.  I am crawling out from a compressed summer of tons of short and longer fun fun fun travel punctuated by moving our 85 year old mother from her home of 53 years in San Diego to a little home she has owned in northern California where she can be near us all.  

So my first post out of the gate is: I don't believe in "arthritis."  What do I mean by that?  Well, I believe there is deterioration in bones and it can be witnessed and measured by x-rays and the like.  But what doctors call "arthritis" (and regular people think of usually as being caused by deterioration in the bones) is actually just a medical term for the pain and the stiffness and swelling that many people experience.  

And while I do very much believe that people are experiencing that pain, stiffness and swelling, I do not believe there is something called "arthritis" that causes it.  It's tricky because arthritis is really not a cause, it's an effect.  But of what?

What I don't believe is that there is some permanent condition that makes us have pain or discomfort and that cannot be healed.  And neither does Dr. John Sarno.

Dr. John Sarno, a physician who wrote such bestselling books as Healing Back Pain, Mind Over Back Pain, The Divided Mind, & The Mind-Body Connection, studied and published articles in respected medical journals about the mind's role in pain in the body.

In these studies, which have been replicated many times, he showed that deterioration of bones does not cause pain.  Pretty much every single adult over the age of 40 has deterioration of bones, compressed or crushed disks in the spine, and the like.  The vast majority of those who have these experience or report no pain, swelling or discomfort in the area of that deterioration.  

However, when people come into a doctor complaining of joint pain or swelling or discomfort and an x-ray is taken, these deteriorations in the area of the discomfort are discovered and connected with "arthritis" and then people come to believe that there is something called arthritis that caused their pain and that is caused by something called aging and it is not going to go away.

You could read anyone of Dr. Sarno's books to understand how you can actually heal yourself from almost any condition by understanding the role your brain/mind is playing in keeping you ill.  Or you could watch this old but still riveting 20-20 investigation into Sarno's work and how effective it has been for people.  

90% of Dr. Sarno's work (he died last year, but his clinic in New York continues on) is really working with people to understand that they can direct their brain to heal their body and it will work.   A huge number of people can't hear that.  They think that they are being told that their pain is all in their mind--it demonstrably isn't.  They think that they are being told they caused it--they didn't. 

What the work of Dr. Sarno is telling people is once they understand how the mind-body connection works, they can heal themselves of almost any condition (which is super exciting).

For more on Sarno's work go to this: Tension Myositis Syndrome wiki and resources