“The TMS Solution: An Easy and Proven Way to Heal Back Pain Without Medication or Surgery” by Sarno Clinic

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“The TMS Solution: An Easy and Proven Way to Heal Back Pain Without Medication or Surgery”

You’ve tried everything — painkillers, physical therapy, even the prospect of surgery.

Yet your back pain persists, diminishing your quality of life and leaving you wondering if you’ll ever find relief.

In “The TMS Solution”, you’ll discover a life-changing approach pioneered by Dr. John Sarno, whose revolutionary understanding of Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) has helped tens of thousands overcome chronic back pain. This book shows you how to recognize the hidden emotional patterns that fuel your pain — and how to dissolve them for good.

Through evidence-based research, clinical case studies, step-by-step guidance, and compassionate insight, you’ll learn how your stress responses, unresolved emotions, and psychological pressures directly influence your physical pain.

As you read, you’ll uncover the surprising connection between your thoughts, your nervous system, and your pain — and how to break free.

You’ll understand how to:

• Identify the emotional triggers and unconscious stress patterns driving your pain
• Shift from fear and frustration to clarity and confidence in your body’s natural ability to heal
• Experience real relief without medication, exercises, or surgery

“The TMS Solution” isn’t just about treating your back pain. It’s about healing your pain once and for all.

It’s about giving you back your life — with freedom, ease, and lasting relief.

“After exorcising a diary’s worth of negative feelings over four months, I was — in spite of my incredulousness — cured.” Juno DeMelo

“Dr. Sarno has cured thousands of sufferers of chronic pain that the medical community has misdiagnosed and been unable to relieve. His groundbreaking work puts him millennia ahead of the medical establishment.” Edward Siedle

“Mainstream medicine has not only failed to treat chronic pain successfully, its practices are creating more of it. The increase in chronic pain, disability, and reliance on opiates is staggering. That’s because doctors haven’t been trained in how to address it properly, and are just as frustrated as their patients.” Dr David Hanscom

“The TMS Solution” Sarno Clinic Edition (Instant downloads for all devices) $9.99 - Buy now

“The TMS Solution” Kindle Edition (Instant download for Kindle) $9.99 - Buy now

“The TMS Solution” Paperback Edition $19.99 - Buy now

Sarno Clinic Edition gives you the best value with three file formats: EPUB, MOBI, and PDF — so you can read on any device. Securely pay with Visa, Mastercard, and more. Right after purchase, you’ll get download links for all three formats. We’ll also send you a thank you email with your download links and an option to generate an invoice.

Sample - Chapter 1 Invisible epidemic: Chronic pain in modern society

Back pain likely affects you or someone close to you.

It’s a condition so commonplace that it has become almost expected as a normal part of aging or working life. Yet this acceptance masks what is truly an epidemic — one that remains largely invisible despite its enormous human and economic costs.

When Dr. John Sarno began his medical practice in the 1960s, he followed conventional wisdom about back pain. Like most physicians of his era, he believed that back pain stemmed primarily from structural problems — herniated discs, degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, or muscle strains.

Yet as the years passed, Dr. Sarno observed something that challenged his medical training — patients with identical structural abnormalities on their imaging studies often experienced dramatically different levels of pain, and many patients with severe pain showed no structural abnormalities at all.

“The statistics are nothing short of alarming,” Dr. Sarno noted in his clinical observations. “Back pain has become the second most common reason for doctor visits in the United States, surpassed only by the common cold.”

Back pain can only be described as a modern epidemic and conventional approaches have failed to stem its rising tide.

Prevalence of back pain

The statistics surrounding back pain reveal a startling picture.

At any given moment, an estimated 731 million people worldwide are experiencing low back pain. Throughout your lifetime, you have an estimated 80% chance of experiencing debilitating back pain at least once. More concerningly, once you’ve had one episode, the likelihood of recurrence climbs dramatically.

According to the Global Burden of Disease Study, low back pain remains the leading cause of years lived with disability worldwide. The economic impact is equally staggering.

In the United States alone, Americans spend at least $50 billion annually on back pain treatments — and some estimates place the total economic burden, including lost productivity and wages, at up to $200 billion per year.

These numbers reflect only the visible costs. They fail to capture the countless hours spent in discomfort, the activities abandoned, the sleep lost, and the psychological toll that chronic pain exacts on those who suffer from it.

A 2018 study published in The Lancet examined the global burden of low back pain and found that disability due to back pain has increased by more than 50% since 1990, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries.

The study concluded that the global burden of low back pain is projected to increase even further in coming decades, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries, which poses a challenge to health care and social systems. This trend suggests that your risk of experiencing debilitating back pain is actually increasing, regardless of where you live in the world.

Dr. Sarno observed this trend decades before the formal studies confirmed it.

“We’re not witnessing a structural epidemic,” he would often tell his medical students. “Human spines haven’t suddenly become more fragile. Something else is happening — something that conventional medicine has largely overlooked.”

Impact on daily life and productivity

Beyond the statistics is the personal toll that back pain takes on your daily life.

Simple activities that you once took for granted — picking up your child, gardening on a weekend afternoon, or simply sitting comfortably through a movie — become exercises in endurance or impossibilities altogether.

In professional environments, the impact can be equally debilitating. A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that workers with back pain reported significantly reduced productivity even when they remained at work.

This phenomenon, known as presenteeism, may actually cost employers more than absenteeism. The study estimated that the average productivity loss due to back pain was equivalent to 5.2 hours per week for affected workers.

“Pain changes how you experience the world,” Dr. Sarno noted in his clinical observations. “It narrows your focus and diminishes your capacity for joy. Even mild, persistent pain demands a portion of your attention, leaving less mental energy for everything else in your life.”

For many of Dr. Sarno’s patients, their back pain had reshaped their identities. They began to see themselves as fragile or damaged, carefully monitoring their activities and becoming hypervigilant about their bodies.

Many developed elaborate avoidance strategies — declining social invitations, modifying their homes with special furniture, or abandoning beloved hobbies and sports.

You may recognize similar patterns in your own life or in the lives of people you care about. This recognition is the first step toward understanding the true nature of the back pain epidemic.

Failure of conventional treatments

Given the prevalence of back pain and its enormous costs, one might expect modern medicine to have developed effective solutions.

Yet despite tremendous advances in imaging technology, surgical techniques, and pain management, the back pain epidemic continues unabated — and by some measures, it’s worsening.

A landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1994 sent shockwaves through the medical community. Researchers performed MRI scans on 98 people with no back pain symptoms whatsoever.

The results were startling. 64% of these pain-free individuals had abnormal disc findings that would typically be considered causes of back pain. Among subjects over 60 years old, 93% had disc degeneration, 79% had disc bulges, and 21% had disc protrusions — all without experiencing any pain.

This study challenged the fundamental premise of structural approaches to back pain. If supposedly abnormal findings are present in the majority of people without symptoms, how can we be certain that these same findings are the cause of pain in symptomatic patients?

Dr. Sarno found this study vindicated what he had observed in his clinical practice for years.

“The correlation between structural abnormalities and pain is weak at best,” he would explain to patients bewildered by their MRI results. “Your pain is real — intensely real — but its source may not be what conventional wisdom suggests.”

The failure extends beyond diagnosis to treatment. A 2009 systematic review published in the Annals of Internal Medicine evaluated the effectiveness of various interventions for low back pain.

The researchers found that while some treatments provided modest short-term relief, none demonstrated substantial long-term benefits. Even more troubling, many widely used interventions — including bed rest, lumbar supports, and certain types of back exercises — showed either no benefit or potential harm in some cases.

As you consider your own experiences with back pain treatments, you may recall temporary improvements followed by disappointing relapses.

This pattern is distressingly common and reflects the limitations of approaches that focus exclusively on structural or mechanical factors.

Psychological and emotional toll

Beyond the physical discomfort lies another dimension of suffering that receives far less attention — the psychological impact of chronic back pain.

Depression rates among chronic back pain sufferers are significantly higher than in the general population, with some studies suggesting that people with chronic back pain are four times more likely to develop major depression.

The relationship between pain and mental health runs both ways. Your emotional state can influence how you perceive pain, and persistent pain can profoundly affect your emotional wellbeing. This creates the potential for a dangerous downward spiral, where pain leads to depression, which then amplifies the experience of pain.

Dr. Sarno recognized this bidirectional relationship early in his career.

“Pain is never purely physical,” he observed. “It’s always processed through the lens of your mind, colored by your expectations, fears, and beliefs. Two people can experience identical physical stimuli and report entirely different levels of pain.”

This understanding led Dr. Sarno to question whether the relationship between mind and body in pain perception might be even more fundamental than medicine had previously recognized.

It’s a question that would ultimately lead to his revolutionary theory of Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS).

Financial burden of back pain

The economic impact of back pain extends far beyond direct medical costs.

When you experience back pain, you face not only healthcare expenses but potential loss of income, reduced career opportunities, and in severe cases, permanent disability.

According to the American Chiropractic Association, back pain accounts for more than 264 million lost workdays per year in the United States — that’s two workdays for every full-time worker in the country. For employers, this translates to reduced productivity, increased disability claims, and higher healthcare premiums.

For you as an individual, the financial consequences can be devastating. A 2012 study published in Spine examined the economic burden on patients with chronic low back pain and found that the average annual medical costs for these patients were $8,386 — more than twice the costs for matched controls without back pain. When indirect costs like lost wages were included, the total economic burden increased to $10,393 per patient annually.

Dr. Sarno frequently noted the irony that many patients spent thousands of dollars on treatments that provided only temporary relief.

“The medical system has created a revolving door,” he observed. “Patients receive treatments that address symptoms without resolving the underlying cause, virtually ensuring they’ll return for more treatment in the future.”

This cycle of treatment and recurrence benefits various stakeholders in the healthcare industry while failing to truly heal those suffering from back pain.

Breaking this cycle requires a fundamentally different approach to understanding the origins of pain.

Social context of the back pain epidemic

While back pain may feel intensely personal when you’re experiencing it, the epidemic exists within a broader social and cultural context.

Several factors in modern society may contribute to both the prevalence of back pain and our collective approach to addressing it.

Sedentary lifestyles represent one obvious culprit. As work has shifted from physical labor to desk jobs, many people spend the majority of their waking hours sitting — a position that places considerably more stress on the lumbar spine than standing. Your body evolved for movement and rebels against this unnatural stillness with stiffness and pain.

Yet Dr. Sarno observed that physically active individuals suffered from back pain at comparable rates to their sedentary counterparts.

“If physical activity were protective in the way we assume,” he noted, “we would expect athletes and manual laborers to experience significantly less back pain than office workers. But that’s not what the data show.”

Another factor may be the increased pace and stress of modern life. As technological advances have accelerated the tempo of work and blurred the boundaries between professional and personal time, the resulting chronic stress creates ideal conditions for tension-related pain syndromes.

Your body, unable to distinguish between physical and psychological threats, responds to deadline pressure and email overload with the same physiological stress response it would use to prepare for physical danger.

The medicalization of back pain also plays a role in perpetuating the epidemic. When you experience back pain today, you enter a medical system primed to find structural causes and offer structural solutions.

You receive diagnostic labels that reinforce the notion of physical damage, and treatments focused on your body rather than your life circumstances or emotional state.

“Medical specialization has fragmented our approach to health,” Dr. Sarno observed. “We have specialists for the spine, specialists for pain management, specialists for psychological care — but few practitioners looking at the whole person. Back pain falls through the cracks between these specialized domains.”

Chapter summary

As you’ve seen throughout this chapter, back pain represents not just a personal health challenge but a societal epidemic of staggering proportions.

The statistics reveal its prevalence, the stories illuminate its human impact, and the research exposes the limitations of conventional approaches.

Dr. Sarno’s clinical observations, initially greeted with skepticism by many in the medical establishment, have gained increasing support from scientific research.

The mind-body connection in pain perception is no longer a fringe concept but an established scientific principle, substantiated by advances in neuroscience and pain research.

Yet despite this progress, the back pain epidemic continues unabated. Millions suffer needlessly, trapped in a cycle of pain, failed treatments, and dashed hopes. The economic and human costs accumulate, largely invisible despite their magnitude.

The persistence of this epidemic in the face of advanced medical technology suggests that we have been looking in the wrong places for solutions.

If structural approaches alone were sufficient, we would expect to see declining rates of back pain as imaging and surgical techniques improve. Instead, we see the opposite.

This paradox forms the foundation for the revolutionary approach you’ll discover in the chapters that follow.

By questioning fundamental assumptions about the nature and origins of pain, Dr. Sarno developed a treatment paradigm that has helped thousands of patients recover from debilitating back pain — often after all conventional approaches had failed.

Your journey through this book may challenge deeply held beliefs about your body and your pain. It may require you to consider possibilities that seem counterintuitive or that conflict with what medical authorities have told you. Yet for countless patients who have found relief through Dr. Sarno’s approach, this intellectual journey proved to be the path to physical freedom.

As you continue reading, maintain an open mind about the true causes of your pain. The most effective solution may be radically different from what you’ve been led to believe — and potentially much simpler than you imagine.

Discover more by visiting Sarno Clinic online at sarnoclinic.com

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“The TMS Solution” Sarno Clinic Edition (Instant downloads for all devices) $9.99 - Buy now

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“The TMS Solution” Paperback Edition $19.99 - Buy now

Sarno Clinic Edition gives you the best value with three file formats: EPUB, MOBI, and PDF — so you can read on any device. Securely pay with Visa, Mastercard, and more. Right after purchase, you’ll get download links for all three formats. We’ll also send you a thank you email with your download links and an option to generate an invoice.