The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain

The book reads a bit like psychology text, with Sarno quoting from psychoanalytic theorists including Heinz Kohut and Graeme Taylor and the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition). Sarno walks through the neurophysiology of mindbody disorders, lists the symptoms of dozens of disorders that he believes are emotion-based, and offers a basic program for overcoming psychosomatic pain and illness. His recovery plan includes meditation and sometimes psychotherapy, including behavior modification, and stopping any medication or physical therapy. While Sarno's ideas seem radical, they were commonly implemented earlier in the 20th century, when psychoanalysis was at its peak of popularity, and they promise to become more accepted in our current era of alternative medical therapies and anger management. --Erica Jorgensen

Product Description
Dr. John Sarno caused quite a ruckus back in 1990 when he suggested that back pain is all in the head. In his bestselling book, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection, he claimed that backaches, slipped discs, headaches, and other chronic pains are due to suppressed anger, and that once the cause of the anger is addressed, the pain will vanish. Relieved Amazon.com readers call this book "liberating" and say "it sounds too good to be true, but it is true." Sarno has returned with The Mindbody Prescription, in which he explains how emotions including guilt, anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem can stimulate the brain to manufacture physical symptoms including fibromyalgia, repetitive strain injuries, migraine headaches, hay fever, colitis, ulcers, and even acne. If these psychosomatic problems all sound a little Freudian, what with the repression of emotions in the unconscious, it's because Sarno unapologetically borrows from Freud for the basis of his theory and cites childhood trauma as a major source of emotional problems. He also says that his program is a "talking cure" of sorts, since patients must be convinced their pain is rooted in their emotions before healing can begin. The book reads a bit like psychology text, with Sarno quoting from psychoanalytic theorists including Heinz Kohut and Graeme Taylor and the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition). Sarno walks through the neurophysiology of mindbody disorders, lists the symptoms of dozens of disorders that he believes are emotion-based, and offers a basic program for overcoming psychosomatic pain and illness. His recovery plan includes meditation and sometimes psychotherapy, including behavior modification, and stopping any medication or physical therapy. While Sarno's ideas seem radical, they were commonly implemented earlier in the 20th century, when psychoanalysis was at its peak of popularity, and they promise to become more accepted in our current era of alternative medical therapies and anger management. --Erica Jorgensen

I found Dr. Sarno's book by chance on a bookstore shelf on the way to see a movie one Saturday night. After reading two paragraphs I sat down and immediately began to cry because I knew I'd found the answers I'd been looking for all these years. I knew Dr. Sarno was absolutely correct because, 1) I knew my pain was related to traumatic incidents in my life, 2) I realized that immediately after anything that increased oxygen to my muscles (exercise, acupuncture) the pain decreased, and 3) whenever I talked to anyone about my problems, which was rare, I felt immediately better. (All these topics are covered in the book.)

Dr. Sarno lead me down the trail of facing my true feelings & not living in denial. It's been hard work these past two months & I have to constantly remind myself that any pain can be stopped if I face my unconscious rage, but IT'S WORTH IT! I'm nearly painfree already.

My personality has completely changed & I can now interact normally with the people I love without living life through a fog of pain. I can also play the violin again which I had to quit due to the intense pain.

Don't miss this book if you have any sort of emotional pain...It will give you your life back!


Sarno is a pioneer   January 20, 2000
Marshall Glickman, author of the Mindful Money Guide (Ballantine Books) (Vermont)
49 out of 49 found this review helpful

Last winter I was stricken with near-crippling lower-back and hip pain, which I initially attributed to a combination of basketball and hours of shoveling heavy snow. For more than a month, getting out of bed each morning was a painful, arduous affair that could take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes. As the day wore on I would improve somewhat but was still unable to sit in a chair, let alone exercise, do yoga, or contemplate cross-country skiing or playing hoops. I sought help from doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, physical therapists, and an acupuncturist. While acupuncture was very helpful, my long-term cure came from Dr. John Sarno's book Mind Over Back Pain. In it, Sarno clearly explains how the vast majority of back, neck, and shoulder pain is caused by stress. The pain I felt wasn't imaginary or psychosomatic in the sense that there weren't actually physical symptoms, but the cause of those symptoms (the result of restricted blood flow to my lower-back region) came from not processing my emotions as emotions. My back took the brunt of what my mind wasn't fully able/ready to accept. In The MindBody Prescription Dr. Sarno moves beyond just the back to explain how and why the mind causes pain in any number of places in the body; he applies those insights to help heal other maladies such as allergies, carpal tunnel syndrome, skin problems, and chronic fatigue syndrome. The reason most of these ailments don't respond to drugs and physical manipulations is that these approaches don't address the root cause of the problem: unrecognized emotional turmoil. If you're suffering from an ailment that is difficult to diagnose or not responding finding to conventional, or even alternative cures, read Sarno's book.


Read slowly and carefully   September 14, 2000
Mcgivern Owen L (NY, NY USA)
46 out of 50 found this review helpful

In all fairness to readers, someone needs to establish that often there is simply no substitute for an occasional office visit to a real live medical doctor. One cannot cure EVERYTHING from a book. I also don't believe that the "Power of Positive Thinking" can cure all ills. With these caveats aside, it can be safely stated that this is a 4 or 5 star piece of work. It covers such a wide range of medical issues that no one review could fairly cover them all. I believe the best advice to "amazoners" is simply to buy the book and read it carefully, testing Dr. Sarno's theories and taking what you can. Treat it as a checkpoint of sorts, to be referred back to. Do not read it as a novel that can be discarded or recycled to a friend. "The Mind Body Prescription" belongs on your shelf permanently. Some readers may feel more comfortable starting with the author's "Healing Back Pain" (a true 5 star work!). That will introduce one to the Sarno philosophy before proceeding to "The Mind Body Prescription". Either way, Dr. Sarno has some excellent ideas. We all owe it to ourselves to read one or two of his writings.