What is the science behind Dr. John Sarno's mind-body approach?

Chronic pain remains one of the most difficult conditions to treat, largely because it rarely has a single cause.

For decades, clinicians have searched for a framework that accounts for the many patients whose pain persists long after tissue damage has healed, or who show no structural abnormality at all despite significant, ongoing symptoms.

Dr. John Sarno’s mind-body approach, built around his concept of Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), was one of the first widely known attempts to address this gap. It proposed that much of chronic pain - particularly back pain - originates not from structural damage but from repressed emotion expressing itself through the body.