I read Sarno’s Healing Back Pain many years ago. I’ve mentioned Sarno on this blog at least once. Sarno claims to alleviate many medical problems with his psychological approach. Whenever my wife or I get a migraine or flare of low back pain, we jokingly refer to is as “repressed anger.” Dr Sarno helped Dr Stephan Guyenet (PhD) with his low back pain.
From Paul Ingraham:
Sarno is articulate and has some important ideas, yes — but he’s also gotten into the business of selling miracle cures. The more recent the book, the less he sounds like a doctor and the more he reads like a mind-body medicine guru trying to convince you that you can heal anything if you can just master the right mental attitude.
Yuck. I don’t care for that. I don’t like it any better than I like the opposite extreme: denying the importance of the mind in medicine is just as foolish as exaggerating it.
History has shown us that it is all too easy to sell books by promising that the “power of the mind” can do whatever you want to believe it can do. Sarno has jumped on that old bandwagon. And so, unfortunately, it is not possible for a serious thinker to take Sarno at his word straight through his books. It is necessary to take the good, and filter out the exaggerated, the grandiose, the empty promises.
Source: Critical Analysis Review of Dr. John Sarno’s Books & Ideas
Steve Parker, M.D.