I have plumbed the depths of despair with chronic shooting leg pains, back pains, watching the clock all day and all night counting the hours till the next pain pill.
I am 55 now, it started when I was about 25. Maybe a racquetball mishap. I walked with my spine twisted for a few weeks after that but it slowly went away.
Years later it came back, a little worse and would last a little longer each time it came back.
A few years ago it hung around for about six months. I paid 4k out of pocket for non surgical spinal decompression, which seemed to do the trick. I was pain free after about 15 sessions. Strange thing is the guy told me it would be about 15 sessions...and then exactly 15 sessions later, I felt great. I now think there is a very good chance that that was a placebo cure. I will get to that,
A few things you must know about pain in general, and the spine, and doctors, and the brain.
1) The spine is very strong and resilient and heals quickly.
2) The brain is in charge of all pain the body feels.
3) Bulging discs among people over the age of 30 are almost a given. Everyone has them, yet most people do not have back pain.
4) The Placebo effect is very real and well known to science: you can give someone a tic-tac and tell them it is a powerful pain killer and their pain will go away.
5) The Nocebo effect is also real and well known to science: you can give someone a heavy duty pain killing pill and tell someone that it it is a tic-tac and their pain will NOT go away.
6) Back specialists can take a look at 1000 spinal X-rays and MRIs with all sorts of horrible things in them--bone on bone vertebrae, bulging discs, ruptured discs, lesions -- and these back doctors cannot reliably predict which patients will have pain and which will not. Some with crazy damage have no pain, and someone with a slightly bulging disc has been in a wheelchair for 6 years.
7) Back surgery has a very low success rate. Often people will be fine for a while, then the pain comes back in some other part of their back.
The last time I had back pain it was taking the normal trajectory. I felt I was in for another few months of agony, but when my pain was at its apogee, the highest point in the arc and I knew I had many months to go, I sat in my kitchen, talking to myself, and the pain drained from a 9 down to a zero in perhaps seven seconds. And it did not come back.
Is this to say that back pain is all in your head? Sort of, the pain is real, it is just a matter of what is causing it. Your brain may indeed detect that something is off, or there has been some injury and the other knowledge surrounding spinal stuff kicks in and your brain gives you this very real pain.
So now I am gonna ask you to watch this video that John Stossel did on Dr. a John Sarno, who is a back pain specialist with probably the best record of actually curing people of their chronic pain JUST BY TALKING TI THEM.
Here it is. Go. And continue on down the rabbit hole until your pain just goes away…it really really can happen.
