July 7, 2021 • 35 mins
A psychosomatic disorder or illness refers to one that is caused by stress and emotions. Can stress actually cause severe, chronic pain? I spoke with Dr David Hanscom, a former orthopedic surgeon who quit his practice after 32 years to teach people why back surgery is usually not the answer. You'll also hear from a special guest... my dad.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Prodigy is production of IHR radio. When an illness or
pain is psycho somatic, it means it's caused by stress.
But good luck telling someone an intense, prolonged pain that
it's all on their head, because it's not actually all
on their head. The origin of the stress is but
the physical manifestation is quite real. It happens all the time.
(00:23):
It's not a question of if stress affects your body.
I mean, that's pretty obvious. All you have to do
is measure someone's blood pressure. It's how do you stop it,
especially when most people can't actually avoid the things that
create the stress. I mean, life in general is pretty
damn stressful. I have some level of constant anxiety that
I pushed down every day. I may not always see
(00:44):
an immediate reaction like these freaking pimples that popped up
last night, probably because I cussed out on anti vactory yesterday,
But over time this can lead to dehabilitating chronic pain.
In a very common area for it to show up
is your back. We used to consider this mainly pseudoscience,
or as I call it, junk science, and I can
understand why we don't really understand the brain all that well.
(01:06):
And it does seem like the perfect place for a
snake oil salesman to turn a profit. But we do
know that the mind and body are powerfully interconnected, so
let's find out how we can get better control over
our own brains. My name is Lull Berlante and this
is Prodigy, So I'm a huge skeptic, Like, wow, that
(01:39):
study is a cool headline, but where's the meta analysis?
And my dad is a notorious forwarder of articles, you know,
the ones that are like eating lentils twice a week
shown to prolonged lifespan or garlic can cure certain forms
of cancer. The last money sent me was about curing
chronic pain. It was based on the work of Dr Sarno.
(02:00):
I didn't pay much attention to it, but the next
day I got an email from a public relations person
that I really like to see if I was interested
in doing an episode with someone on the same subject.
That was pretty much enough to get me interested. I mean,
how powerful is the mind body connection? So we scheduled
it out. A week later, my parents visited, so I
sat down to record with my dad. This is Fred.
(02:21):
My father had back pain like his entire life. I
remember him a couple of times crawling into the house
where he couldn't he do doing some gardening, and he'd
come in in a tremendous back pain. I mean literally
screaming in back pain. The thing that I found odd
that in all those years growing up in the fifties
and sixties, my dad has all this back pain. He
(02:44):
retires at sixty and completely the back pain stops. I never, ever,
ever after your time, and heard any back pain. He
could argue a lot of things using account he side
at a desk all day long. But the truth is
that the stress left his life, and so the pain
left his life. And so it's the same thing with me.
(03:06):
I was when I had my automotive shops. One of
the shops I was, I saw some oil on the floor.
I picked up a heavy mop and I started, you know,
cleaning it, twisting my body like a golfer twist his body.
I just wrenched my back and it was in tremendous pain,
so such pain that I that I was literally I
went to bed Dad night. I couldn't get out of bed.
(03:27):
I had to screw screech myself, dragged myself out a bit. First,
I tried an orthopedic. Gu I couldn't get an appointments.
We tried, went straight to a chiropractor. He saw a
local chiropractor, went to his office. He tapped my back,
tap tap tap, tap tap, nothing, but he showed me
an X ray. He said, you have some serious problems.
He said, I could see this, and he showed look.
(03:49):
He said, you don't need to be a doctor here.
You could see that there's no there's no cartilage between
the bones of these different parts of your spine. And
I can't remember what he said the l to the
only I don't know what it was before he showed
me on a number of places. He said, you will
be in pain the rest of your life. However, I'll
try to help you as best I can, but you'll
never get out of it. She'll always be in pain.
(04:10):
I went home and I got the book. And I
can't remember how it got to me because it's been
so many years, but I got the book. I started
reading it and started doing some of the the work
he says. He really suggested literally scream at your pain,
try to stop yourself, and it sounds crazy, but it
really works, and and induce some meditation and did some
(04:31):
some some meditation work with myself, and uh, after a while,
I don't know, a couple of days the pain stopped
and I haven't had that pain. Since. Fred's story isn't
quite done yet, we'll hear more from him later. Dr
sarry No believed that chronic back, neck, and limb pain
that couldn't be treated by standard medicine was caused by stress.
(04:54):
He coined the term tension my ostas syndrome or TMS
for short. He also included gas, stro intestinal, and dermatological
issues in it, but the primary symptom was back payton.
His work was rejected at the time and he was
mocked by his peers. In fact, it still isn't accepted
by mainstream medicine. However, some people say he changed their life,
(05:15):
and not just a few crazy people, a lot of
very sane people. Dr Sarno has passed, but his work
is not. Doctor David Hanscomb is a former orthopedic surgeon
who has treated thousands of patients during his thirty two
year career. He quit his practice after realizing how critical
this work is. He recently released a book titled do
(05:36):
You Really Need Spine Surgery? Take Control with the surgeon's advice.
My name is David Hanscomb. I am an orthopedic spine
surgeon and I practice complex spine surgery for over thirty
years in Seattle, Washington. Eventually learned through a lot of
experience the spine surgy doesn't always work that well. In fact,
(05:56):
one of those surgeons who was one of the more
aggressives for surgeons in the country for about eight years
when I came out of my spine fellowship, Seattle had
nine times during a spine shurty per capita as any
place in the country, and that was part of that
jargon out. We just thought we had things really figured out,
and I would actually feel badly if I didn't find
a reason to do spine shurting. I've actually found out
(06:18):
about years and my practice at the success rate for
a spine fusion for back pens about and I just
instantly stopped. I did not know what to do, but
I knew I wasn't going to keep doing that. So
I went in to chronic ping myself about fifteen years
and slowly learned ways to self chronic pain that do
(06:38):
not in clue surgery. Occasionally include surgery, but it's been
quote a journey and about two years to actually quit
my practice of spine shurrety. You actually pursue this project
full time. What exactly is a fusion. So what a
fusion is is basically welding to get the bones. For instance,
if you have an ankle fusion, you take the joint,
you destroy it rough and hit up, and then over
time the body turned it into a solid piece of own.
(07:00):
The same thing with vertebrae is that you put in
scruction place to hold it still, and then you place
bone graft across that segment. Then what happens the metal
is just temper into the bone graft heels. So it's
the bone that keeps a fusion solids. So what you're doing,
you're eliminating motion between vertebrae. And the idea is that
the disk is the source of the pain, then by
(07:22):
doing a fusion, you'll actually get rid of the pain.
What's ironic, and I can hardly say this without getting upset.
Which ironic is that we do not know where back
ping comes from most of the time. But what we
do know, it's been well documented that disc degeneration is
not a cause of pain. Yeah, it's the most common
reason we do surgery for back paint. What types of
(07:44):
situations do need surgery. Well, for instance, there's decompression surgery
where you have a pinch nerve. And for instance, if
you have sidetica or pain down your arm and that
particular nerve is being pinched, when you take the prey
us off of that nerve, the results are almost and
sometimes we need don't do the surgery. It's almost impossible
(08:05):
to solve it without surgery. As far as the fusion
for back pain, it's an operation that should never be done,
period should not be done, and I actually equated to
do in frontal lobotomies. There's no data for it. There's
not one research paper in sixty years that says doing
a fusion for back pain makes any sense, particularly since
the reason we're doing the fusion, the degenerated disk. Bone
(08:27):
spurs are threats have been well documented and not being
the start of pain. So for back pain neck pain,
there's tumors and infections and fractures that need to be stabilized. Remember,
fusion takes an unstable segment and stabilizes it. So there
are times to do but that probably happens less than
five percent of the time. The bottom line is fine Jurnty.
(08:49):
For it to be effective, you have to clearly identify
the problem before you can fix it. With back pain,
you don't know where the pain is coming from, and
we do the surgery anyway, and again the data is
as dismal as far as the success of my back
fusion for back pain. So your argument is is that
it has to be something that you can see structurally,
and then that structural has to also match up with
(09:11):
the patient's symptoms. They're feeling correct, And it's not that hard.
I mean, if you go to a dentist with a
painful tooth, you see the cavity and fix it. It
works pretty well, right m But what if you go
to the dentist with this mouth pain and you can't
identify what tooth it is. Maybe it's the gums, maybe
it's the sinuses, who knows what it could be? And
(09:32):
you start doing random procedures. How's that going to work?
You know, not very well? And same thing, you take
a card to the shop. Unless the mechanic makes an
accurate diagnosis as to what their problem is, it starts
to doing random interventions. It doesn't work. It's the same
thing with spine jury. There's some sort of I'll use
the work urban legend that if all else has failed,
(09:53):
let's do surgery. Well, if all of us has failed
for a surgical problem, then do the surgery. I mean
many curticulations, by the way, are solved without surgery. But
at least if every surgicalation that you can see surgeries
and option most spine shurdy that fails is done on
situations that you can't even see the problem one percentage
(10:13):
of people. There's no structural like things that you can
see on an m r I scan. Well, it's just
an estimate. I just see the vast majority of spines
tradition not be done. And again with back pain is
less than five percent you can actually see the problem.
So not a five percent of back pain is coming
from muscles, tendance, ligaments. Who knows where it's coming from,
but it's not coming from something that you can see. Yet,
(10:35):
we're really close, actually upwards of twenty billion dollars a
year doing spine surgeries on normally aging spines. Okay, one
of the things I saw that you said is that
the last five years of neuroscience research has been like
we've made a lot of steps forward. Can you explain
what some of that has taught us? Well, let's go
(10:56):
clear back to my medical school days, which I wish
they had actually taught me this back then. So everybody
knows what phantom limp pain is. Right where you lose
an armor, like because of trauma or infection or diabetes,
and before you lose the arm of the leg, there's
lots of paint. But when you do the amputation, over
half the patients still feel the same pain they had
before the surgery. In other words, the brain memorized the pain.
(11:18):
So the limb is gone, why would the pain still
be there? And remember being a medical student going, well,
that's interesting, but nobody ever explained to me what was
going on. It turns out that with chronic pain that
can occur in any part of the body, can be
with headache, stomach pain, back pain, neck pain, any pain
in the body can be memorized because what you're doing,
you're firing these unpleasant impulses to your nervous system, but
(11:40):
they're coming in so quickly that they get memorized within
about three to six months. So indeed, what happens with
back pain, for instance, they've done a very nice. Starting
in two thousand and fourteen that showed that if you
take a key back pain that becomes chronic, that it
switches from the pain center in the brain to the
emotional center. She had the same pain but a different driver,
(12:01):
and it's now memorized. So just abotter what you do.
Like for instance, if we have phantom leg pain, you
can't do more surgery to leg. This not there. So
what we do we program your brain. You can retrain
your brain to go to parts the brain that don't
have pain. For instance, phantom limp pain, which is something
I did not think it was solvable, is actually quite
solvable with the concepts that neuroscience has showed us the
(12:24):
last five years. So phantom limp pain, we see disappear,
not just to live with it, it actually disappears. All right,
let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. Welcome
back to Prodigy. For more infot in My Dog or
di finding the links mentioned in this episode, visit Prodigy
podcast dot com. Let's jump to what the cause of
that pain is. So what we're finding out that mental
(12:47):
pain is actually a bigger problem than physical pain because
what happens is that your brain processes negative thoughts and
unpleasant emotions the same way they process a physical threat,
same part of the brain, same reaction. What happens when
you're under threat of any kind, mental or physical, that
your boasy creates adrenaline, cortisol, all these different stress hormones,
(13:13):
and then your body's on fire, hyper vigilant. But it
also extremlates the immune system, so your brain actually becomes
inflamed and sensitized. So the problem that humans have is
that you can't escape your thoughts. So these pathways get
laid down, so the mental pain. I think that chronic
pain is a disease of human consciousness that the pathways
(13:34):
get laid down early on in life. It was even
more of a problem that expressed thoughts and emotions is
repressed thoughts and emotions. And that's what got me in
deep trouble personally, is that I'm a major spine surgeon.
I was joking with my wife, but I'm not that
much of a joke. Is that, you know, normal people
don't become spine surgeons. It's not a normal way to
(13:55):
live your life. So it was just an incredible master
suppressing stress just stopped it. I mean, what was I
supposed to do is tremendous stresses. You're on a tight
rope all day long, every day for years, and so
I just stepped it. But at age thirty seven, I
went from being a fearless surgeons to crippling anxiety. In
one day, I had a panic attack. So I thought
(14:16):
anxiety was psychological. I actually went into counseling to try
to solve it. It turns out anxiety is the result
of the threat, not the cause. So I think anxiety
in terms of a psychological issue. We try to fix
it and solve it. But if you think about it,
how long would any of us survive without anxiety? Not
(14:36):
very long. You wouldn't breathe, you went eight, you'd walk
out into the streets. So anxiety is this survival mechanisment
is how we evolves, how we survive. So it's a gift.
But the key to this whole process of what is
called the DC journey Direct your Own Care journey, is
that you understand that anxiety is what you have, it's
not who you are. In the unconscious brain. The survival
(14:59):
response this is about twenty million bits of information per second,
twenty million The conscious brain processes forty zero twenty million
versus forty So you can't do my never matter, which
I did for a long time. You can get away
with it for a while. What you have to do
is simply separate your identity from this reaction and realize
(15:20):
it's a very powerful amoral survival response, and then you
learned to what I call developing working relationship with it.
So it turns out when I offered patients surgery to
get rid of the light pain of their arm pain
versus dropping down their anxiety, they want to get rid
of their anxiety. Almost to the person. So even now
I have ouris of my hips and knees. It's actually
(15:41):
more physical pain than I had back years ago when
I had the chronic pain. But with the chronic pain,
I had the anxiety. I also had seventeen different symptoms
and migraine, headache, stomach itches, back pain, neck pain, burning
on my feet, skin rashes. There's over thirty different symptoms
that occur from your body coming street being off. So
(16:02):
I'm starting it's just a word that describes the state
of being hyper alert, hyper vigilant, and it describes the
body's chemistry. But it's not a psychological issue. And this
is related to the anounced vagus nerve. Right, what I'm
excited about. There's Dr Stephen Porges who now lives in Florida,
(16:22):
but he worked out Indiana for many years. He wrote
a book called the poly vegal Theory. He's been researching
was called the vagus nerve for over forty years. And
the vegas nervous the tenth cranial nerve, which means it's
a nerve that originates directly off the brain, so below
the brain. This was called the mid brain. There are
twelve cranial nerves in the vagus nervous, the tenth cranial nerve.
(16:45):
So it's the autonomic nervous system. And the reason why
it's called autonomic because it's automatically controls everything. Controls your
respiratory rate, sweating, your stomach action, bladder action, blood pressure,
all these things to control by the vagus nerve. So
about sent of us input from the body and about
its output back to the body. So it happens is
(17:05):
that when you were under threat, your immune system is
stimulated to your sympathetic nervous system fires up. You have
tremendous amount of inflammation. The vagas nerve is parasympathetic, which
is strong only antiflammatory. So there's a bunch of interventions
you can do that that directly stimulate the vaguest nerve,
(17:25):
which is very very powerful as far as anti inflammatory effect.
So it turns out that chronic pain, anxiety, depression, by
polar are all inflammatory disorders. I wanted to ask, I
guess you developed a treatment that you, I guess learned
through your own experience. Can you go into a little
bit about what that is? So a whareness is the
first step. The second step is that chronic pain is complicated,
(17:50):
is affected by sleeve stress, exercise, medications, life Outlook, all
these things affect pain, and what we're doing in medicine
were throwing randoms us exclusions at a complex problem. It
can't work, and guess what, it doesn't work. Each person
is a different set of variables. So the second factor
is is that you have to treat every aspect of
(18:11):
it simultaneously, which sounds daunting but actually not so. Once
you understand the three to five variables that are affecting you,
and each one is addressed simultaneously, things start to add up. So,
for instance, sleep is a big deal. So sleep could
add anxiety. Frustration is a big deal because your nervous
system is fired up. Another chiropractic, another, So it's an
(18:36):
additive process. And the third step is the patient has
to take control. In other words, the only person that
can really solve the problem for you is going to
be you. So you take the knowledge, the variables, you
take your particular take on it, and then you'll find
your own solution. So it's very much of a self
directed process. You don't need pain clinics. There's just a
(18:56):
bunch of ways to calm your nervous system response down
in your own chemistry down to help everything results and
the pain really does go away. Well, that's great. I
love when I hear it's not a single simple answer
because to me, that's like always the indicator that it's
bullcrap um. But let's say you're in a situation where
(19:17):
you know you have a stressful job and there's just
it's not like you can avoid it. Like, what would
you do to change your thinking so that you can
reduce that anxiety. That's a great question, because first of all,
stress kills people. You know that, right, I'm just being
well documented. Hundreds of research papers that chronic stress kills people,
but people forget to talk about stressing management with the
(19:39):
stress that's actually damaged into your body is the stress
that you can't control. So it's the chronic stress is
actually the most damaging. And so a huge stress your
body fires up, you calm down and move on. With
chronic stress day after day after day, where there's finances
or a spouse or a job, whatever is going on,
your body is exposed to sustain elevated levels of inflammatory markers.
(20:03):
The biggest stress, by the way, are your thoughts. People
cannot escape their human consciousness, so thoughts are even a
bigger stresser than the circumstances. So the solution principle, and
there's lots of details, but i'll just try to give
it a review, is that stress isn't the problem. It's
your chemical reaction to it. You have a stress or
whatever it is. Avoiding stress fact is impossible. And again,
(20:24):
the stresses that are all damaging the ones that you
cannot control. So what you're doing, there's two things you
can do instead of being stressed. Automatic survival response is
what we're supposed to do. That's what we're automatically programmed
to do. Is go into a survival reaction, so any
threat is met with a survival reaction. The key issue
is called neural plasticity. You're actually stimulating your brain to
(20:46):
change in a different direction, and the new set of
circuits in your brain do not have the same pain pathways,
they do not have the same reactivity. So basically with
neo plasticity, you have these stress the increase in space,
and then you redirect. If you're just trying to redirect
to fight the impulses, you're not gonna win. Remembers, The
(21:07):
mind over matter doesn't work. So we start the process
with a very effective to which is incredibly simple and
actually broke me out of fifteen years of chronic pain.
Is called expressive writing, and there's over a thousand research
papers and documents that it works, and it's not the solution,
but it is the starting point. Where you write your
thoughts on a paper, could be anything positive or negative,
(21:28):
and you instantly tear them up and you can't control
your thoughts, but you can separate from them. So your
thoughts are on the table. You have a space between
you and the thoughts that's now connected with vision and feel,
which are part of the unconscious brain. So from a
neural plasticity standpoint, the first step of solving chronic pain
is called expressive rinning. So what that does accomplishes awareness
(21:52):
in separation in one step, and then the reprogram. It
could be just taking deep breath, drop your shoulders, and
let's go back to the bag as nerve for a second. So,
for instance, slow breathing is anti inflammatory, so you do
express it writing and do some slow breathing of less
than ten breasts per minute it's anti inflammatory. Or you
can do some mindfulness work. We just place your attention
(22:13):
on taste or smell or feel. Again, you've redirected, so
instead of fighting, for instance, unpleasant thoughts, will be redirect
your attention not to distract yourself. Remember you have to
feel the pain first before you can redirect, and then
it's one of the hardest parts of the project is
that if you're just doing these tools to avoid feeling pain,
that's that gonna work. So you have to allow yourself
(22:35):
to feel the pain and then redirect. People don't want
to feel the pain, and it's a it's a large scale.
In other words, it's not about just diving into the
pain and being montro being tough. That's actually very counterproductive.
But there's a word we use called pendulation, which means
you back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,
and you do and deal with the pains. You can
(22:55):
tolerate it in Some days are better than others. One
of the first thing to tell people in don't just
give yourself a break. You're in chronic pain. You should
be angry, you should be frustrated. You are angry, and
you are frustrated. It's not going to disappear tomorrow. But
people get harder themselves and self critic hold they're really frustrated,
and they're blaming the person who hurt them. All those
things fire up the nerveses and where the essence of
(23:16):
the solution is learning how to calm down a nervous system.
So the essence of the problem is onjoid exposure to
a threat mental or physical, with mental being the bigger problem.
And the essence of the solution is finding safety, which
means you've learned the tools to control your body is
neuro chemistry. And once you have those tools to change
your body is neuro chemistry, you're free. All right, let's
(23:40):
take a quick break. We'll be right back Welcome back
to Prodigy for more infot in My Dog, or to
finding the links mentioned in this episode because it Prodigy
podcast dot com. Your new chemistry really does change ner
conduction slows down, the inflammation in your brain drops down dramatically,
your organs function better, your metabolisms better, and pain actually disappears.
(24:05):
It's it's in its shocking. I mean, I'm a surgeon,
and I will tell you historically been one of those
people that when I saw somebody watching my office with
chronic pain, I just sort of rolled my eyes and
go whatever. Because there's a really horrible diagnosis going on
right now, which I'm really upset about. Now. I would
not have been this way twenty years ago. But it's
called medically unexplained symptoms. Have you heard this diagnosis at all?
(24:27):
Uh No, But I'm familiar with people like having that
that type of thing. So the stuff I'm talking about
has been in the medical literature for at least thirty years.
This is not new news. I'm not I'm not discovering
new inventions. I'm not discovering new knowledge. I'm uncovering stuff
that's already there, but for some reason it has not
made it into the main stream medical thinking. So this
(24:48):
has been around for a long time as a body's
response to threat creates a reaction that's unpleasant that forces
you to survive. So again the tools like acupuncture, um
medical no IS, M, d R, all these tef of
things I thought was just crazy. You know, I'm as
certain right, So what you're actually doing is directly stuminity
the vegas nerve. For instance, humming stilates the seventh cranial
(25:11):
nerve which is next to the vegas nerve, and just
humming actually is anti inflammatory. Are these referred to as
some like somatic tools. Yes, so when these are word
medically unexplained symptoms, it's really upsetting to be because everything's wrong.
Your glucosism, your cortisolves up, your heart rates going, Your
inflammatory markets are through this ceiling. The inflammatory markets one
(25:33):
it's called I L six, These interlocent societic kinds are
through the ceiling. Your body is off, everything's wrong. So
the symptoms are completely explained by changes in the body
bodies physiology. The end has been well documented that the
anatomy has little if anything to do with pain, so
that the fact that the medical profession has not come
(25:54):
up with this new term called medically unexplained symptoms. To me,
if you're a patient, of course, how do you think
you feel? You're really just saying, well, we don't know
what's going on. You donna have to live with it,
and sort of imply that you know something. You're just
not You're not that strong, you're not that tough. The
impact of chronic pain has been documented in several research
papers actors have the same impact on a person's life
(26:16):
as having terminal cancer. And my argument, and actually one
of the papers did say this, is that it's actually
worse because with turnal cancer, you know what the diagnosis
is right, and you know there's an endpoint, good or bad.
With chronic pain, you have all the uncertainty. Nobody tells
you the diagnosis, You get bounced around, there's no hope
(26:37):
of an endpoint, and people in chronic paining are absolutely miserable.
And that's why I came up with this ternament that
I think you right, called the abyss. During this dark hole,
there's no bottom, there's no way out. What do you do.
It's a horrible place to live. And I was in
an abyss for at least fifteen years. My understanding is like,
you know, because we don't really understand the brain all
(26:57):
that well, but you're saying that you can take a
look at these patients um and see they're like elevated
stress level. We do know that the automom nerve system
is sort of the like Grand Cetral station directing the traffic.
We know that in the periphery that if you have
an injury to your toe, because since believe not, your
nervysm is actually an extension of your toe, didn't It
(27:18):
did not develop any way around. In other words, you
have one cell bacteria that became to cell for cell whatever.
Eventually these organisms became so big they had to develop
a nervous system to interpret the data. So we have
it backwards. We need the brain developed first. It did not.
It's actually the one cell organisms developed first and it
worked in the direction. So it's your nervous system is
connecting to the body that dog that directs the traffic.
(27:41):
And so that's why don't use the word mind body
of syndrome anymore or psychosymatic, because it's just a unit.
You can't sense pain. Your body can't function without a
nervous system, and vice versa. So it's just a unit
response to the environment and we try to treat it psychologically.
It's just one unit. Know, these these tools that you
(28:02):
use for treating this um at the source, are they
something that you have to do ongoing? Well, become they've
become away life. They're instinctual. So I probably spend I
would say, Okay, I've been this for fifteen years. I've
been pain free now for about fifteen years after starting
for fifteen years. So the things that I it's a
learned skill and you get better better with repetition. But
(28:24):
I always say it's probably ten minutes a day spent
and actually thinking about it. So there's a little too
called express obritings to be right down my thoughts, tear
them up. It's about five or ten minutes at the most,
sometimes thirty seconds. It's called active meditation or simply placed
my attention on another sensation. Happens all day long, three
to five seconds. One tool is not discussing your pain,
(28:45):
no complaining. Well, that's something that that's just don't do.
So the key shoe is awareness when your body is
fart up versus this not then you use these tools
that you've learned to instinctively change directions and pretty soon,
just like any athlete or artists that changed the direction
starts becoming very automatic. So yeah, it's it's a matter
(29:06):
of processing information differently. Going back to your original situate
question about you know, if you have a situation that
you can't avoid, what do you do? Look in you
just on my and then to create that space and substitute.
Then the structure of your brain physically changes, right, so
it becomes more automatic. And um, do you ever, let's
(29:27):
say you have a really really bad day or you
forget to um practice, use your tools, and do you
ever feel pain coming back a little bit all the time? Okay,
So so here's the key is that you see people.
It's a bit of a story, but the bottom line
is is that life comes at us, and life last
week and instantly prey well for a night and the
(29:48):
next day. For instance, lack of sleep one night of
bad sleep has been shown to double people's pain the
next day. And guess what my hypo nie just learning
right up that I felt sort of frustrated and here myself,
so I did to my expressive writing. I went into
this victim mode for me, and so I had to
be four days. I was short of rough, but I
do know what to do. So I, you know, last
(30:10):
night and I could sleep, I did a little expressive writing.
I'm just dropping it down. I'm enjoying talking to you.
So yeah, people think that the goal is to be
pain free in living nirvana, and the goal becomes procticsing
the tools. You don't stay in the hole for very long.
So the day after I recorded that bit with my dad,
I got a phone call from my mom and I
(30:32):
swear I'm not making this up. My dad was having
terrible back pain. He could barely even walk. This all
happened about four months ago. So while editing this episode
and writing this voice over, I gave him a call
to follow up. Well, the pain was intense, you know
what I mean. On the scale of one to ten,
it was like a pen. It almost made me a mobile.
(30:52):
Couldn't couldn't even drag home. It was just a lot
of pain. And I don't know why it was. And
I suspect that maybe I was sitting sort of on
a chair and there's I had been sweating a little
bit and there was a cool breeze coming flying glass
story probably hit my back thinking that might have caused it.
I mean, I don't really know what caused it. I
had no idea. So what did you do? Because you're
(31:14):
feeling better now? Right? Yeah, I'm telling better now, but
I want a bunch of relaxation things. I did some stretching,
I did seven eight physcal therapy sessions. I was in
a lot of pain and it started to go away.
I started I listen. I did a lot of the
SORRYO what a couple of videos that sorrow had put out.
But really I couldn't overcome it. It was too much
(31:37):
pain that I couldn't think it away. Really, I couldn't
think this is something in my mind that I should
I should stop. It just wouldn't happen. Are you a
now now? I'm not a hundred percent fulfill some back
pain every once in a while. I felt some today,
but like today I did when I had the back pain.
The meditation that our relaxation and that really believe in
(32:00):
that helps. Has your position changed at all since, like
you've experienced that pain that you couldn't seemingly care with
purely mental stuff? Yeah? Is it did kind of change
because the first time I had it, you know, five
years ago. Yeah, I was able to just sort of
once I read Sarno's book and realize what it was.
I said that this is it. It is unresolve pain.
(32:23):
And I kept trying to talk myself out of it
and yelling at myself even to get myself back into
and then it stopped. It went away in a few days.
I just think, didn't go away a few days. Just
pack that three weeks and it was a lot of
pain for the three weeks. So yeah, is it? It's
as my position changed, you know. I don't know whether
(32:44):
they think that the timing of my dad's pain means
that the mind body connection is more or less meaningful. Regardless,
I think if you're experiencing chronic pain or anxiety, it's
worth the shot. He clearly is helping some people. I
have like a thing I play computer game and I
use my pinky to hit shift a lot, and that's
like a repetitive motion and so like for physical therapy,
(33:04):
gives me like stretches to do for that. But I mean,
that's just a repetitive motion thing. So was that something
that would show up on a on an m r
I scan or or what do you think that's the
cause of no, And that's what I around about the
human body and the way before I knew much about
chronic pain. Anything about chronic pain is that ninety percent
(33:24):
of all pain and the body doesn't drop in any
imaging tests. That was, if you have rotator cuff pain
maybe shows up an m R I scan, it probably doesn't.
Synthing is back pain, nick pain. So you get these
tissues that are irritated, but nothing will show up in
an m R I scan or any imaging starting for
that matter. But I will tell you that tennanitis is
are probably some most painful pains in the body. And
(33:47):
I guess, like anything I missed or main takeaway that
you want people to get from this, well, I was
trying to recommend. I mean, looking at my book Back
and Control, a surgeon's rodment about a chronic pain gives
you a nice foundation about what to do. And again
the three parts of getting better is awareness, treating every
aspect simultaneously, and then you're taking control. And then there's
(34:08):
two choices. One is called the DC journey dot com
where you can go through a sequence that's been successful
for many many patients. We have watched hundreds of patients
going to pain free. And then I also if you
were come to playing spine surgery. I wrote a book
called Do You Really Need Spine Shurgy? And what it
does is a very detail that formed consenter that really
will clarify your decision making in a way that you
(34:29):
don't make a bad decision. You do not want to
be a failed back surgy patient. You just do not
want to do that. So it's all very self directed.
It is all very doable. None of it's very hard
to understand. I actually quit my surgical practices because I
was watching so much damage being done by procedures that
weren't indicated, and so it's discouraging me that the problem
(34:50):
is that big that I felt compelled to do this
because I love my practice, but I'm also very happy
to watch many many people go to pain free with
really minimal resources. Great. Yeah, I definitely came in as
a skeptic, but I feel convinced. So that was great.
Thank you so much. Yeah, you're welcome, and I obviously
always have to answer more questions. It is a paradigm shift.
(35:11):
Dr Hanscomb has two books out. His first one is
called Back in Control and a second is Do You
Really Need Spine surgery. You can find more info at
back in control dot com. Prodigy was created and produced
by me lowber Anti. The executive producer is Tyler Klang.
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to help out,
you can follow the show on Apple Podcast or share
(35:32):
an episode with a friend. I also really appreciate it
when listeners send me messages and I respond to everyone.
Prodigy is production of IHR radio. When an illness or
pain is psycho somatic, it means it's caused by stress.
But good luck telling someone an intense, prolonged pain that
it's all on their head, because it's not actually all
on their head. The origin of the stress is but
the physical manifestation is quite real. It happens all the time.
(00:23):
It's not a question of if stress affects your body.
I mean, that's pretty obvious. All you have to do
is measure someone's blood pressure. It's how do you stop it,
especially when most people can't actually avoid the things that
create the stress. I mean, life in general is pretty
damn stressful. I have some level of constant anxiety that
I pushed down every day. I may not always see
(00:44):
an immediate reaction like these freaking pimples that popped up
last night, probably because I cussed out on anti vactory yesterday,
But over time this can lead to dehabilitating chronic pain.
In a very common area for it to show up
is your back. We used to consider this mainly pseudoscience,
or as I call it, junk science, and I can
understand why we don't really understand the brain all that well.
(01:06):
And it does seem like the perfect place for a
snake oil salesman to turn a profit. But we do
know that the mind and body are powerfully interconnected, so
let's find out how we can get better control over
our own brains. My name is Lull Berlante and this
is Prodigy, So I'm a huge skeptic, Like, wow, that
(01:39):
study is a cool headline, but where's the meta analysis?
And my dad is a notorious forwarder of articles, you know,
the ones that are like eating lentils twice a week
shown to prolonged lifespan or garlic can cure certain forms
of cancer. The last money sent me was about curing
chronic pain. It was based on the work of Dr Sarno.
(02:00):
I didn't pay much attention to it, but the next
day I got an email from a public relations person
that I really like to see if I was interested
in doing an episode with someone on the same subject.
That was pretty much enough to get me interested. I mean,
how powerful is the mind body connection? So we scheduled
it out. A week later, my parents visited, so I
sat down to record with my dad. This is Fred.
(02:21):
My father had back pain like his entire life. I
remember him a couple of times crawling into the house
where he couldn't he do doing some gardening, and he'd
come in in a tremendous back pain. I mean literally
screaming in back pain. The thing that I found odd
that in all those years growing up in the fifties
and sixties, my dad has all this back pain. He
(02:44):
retires at sixty and completely the back pain stops. I never, ever,
ever after your time, and heard any back pain. He
could argue a lot of things using account he side
at a desk all day long. But the truth is
that the stress left his life, and so the pain
left his life. And so it's the same thing with me.
(03:06):
I was when I had my automotive shops. One of
the shops I was, I saw some oil on the floor.
I picked up a heavy mop and I started, you know,
cleaning it, twisting my body like a golfer twist his body.
I just wrenched my back and it was in tremendous pain,
so such pain that I that I was literally I
went to bed Dad night. I couldn't get out of bed.
(03:27):
I had to screw screech myself, dragged myself out a bit. First,
I tried an orthopedic. Gu I couldn't get an appointments.
We tried, went straight to a chiropractor. He saw a
local chiropractor, went to his office. He tapped my back,
tap tap tap, tap tap, nothing, but he showed me
an X ray. He said, you have some serious problems.
He said, I could see this, and he showed look.
(03:49):
He said, you don't need to be a doctor here.
You could see that there's no there's no cartilage between
the bones of these different parts of your spine. And
I can't remember what he said the l to the
only I don't know what it was before he showed
me on a number of places. He said, you will
be in pain the rest of your life. However, I'll
try to help you as best I can, but you'll
never get out of it. She'll always be in pain.
(04:10):
I went home and I got the book. And I
can't remember how it got to me because it's been
so many years, but I got the book. I started
reading it and started doing some of the the work
he says. He really suggested literally scream at your pain,
try to stop yourself, and it sounds crazy, but it
really works, and and induce some meditation and did some
(04:31):
some some meditation work with myself, and uh, after a while,
I don't know, a couple of days the pain stopped
and I haven't had that pain. Since. Fred's story isn't
quite done yet, we'll hear more from him later. Dr
sarry No believed that chronic back, neck, and limb pain
that couldn't be treated by standard medicine was caused by stress.
(04:54):
He coined the term tension my ostas syndrome or TMS
for short. He also included gas, stro intestinal, and dermatological
issues in it, but the primary symptom was back payton.
His work was rejected at the time and he was
mocked by his peers. In fact, it still isn't accepted
by mainstream medicine. However, some people say he changed their life,
(05:15):
and not just a few crazy people, a lot of
very sane people. Dr Sarno has passed, but his work
is not. Doctor David Hanscomb is a former orthopedic surgeon
who has treated thousands of patients during his thirty two
year career. He quit his practice after realizing how critical
this work is. He recently released a book titled do
(05:36):
You Really Need Spine Surgery? Take Control with the surgeon's advice.
My name is David Hanscomb. I am an orthopedic spine
surgeon and I practice complex spine surgery for over thirty
years in Seattle, Washington. Eventually learned through a lot of
experience the spine surgy doesn't always work that well. In fact,
(05:56):
one of those surgeons who was one of the more
aggressives for surgeons in the country for about eight years
when I came out of my spine fellowship, Seattle had
nine times during a spine shurty per capita as any
place in the country, and that was part of that
jargon out. We just thought we had things really figured out,
and I would actually feel badly if I didn't find
a reason to do spine shurting. I've actually found out
(06:18):
about years and my practice at the success rate for
a spine fusion for back pens about and I just
instantly stopped. I did not know what to do, but
I knew I wasn't going to keep doing that. So
I went in to chronic ping myself about fifteen years
and slowly learned ways to self chronic pain that do
(06:38):
not in clue surgery. Occasionally include surgery, but it's been
quote a journey and about two years to actually quit
my practice of spine shurrety. You actually pursue this project
full time. What exactly is a fusion. So what a
fusion is is basically welding to get the bones. For instance,
if you have an ankle fusion, you take the joint,
you destroy it rough and hit up, and then over
time the body turned it into a solid piece of own.
(07:00):
The same thing with vertebrae is that you put in
scruction place to hold it still, and then you place
bone graft across that segment. Then what happens the metal
is just temper into the bone graft heels. So it's
the bone that keeps a fusion solids. So what you're doing,
you're eliminating motion between vertebrae. And the idea is that
the disk is the source of the pain, then by
(07:22):
doing a fusion, you'll actually get rid of the pain.
What's ironic, and I can hardly say this without getting upset.
Which ironic is that we do not know where back
ping comes from most of the time. But what we
do know, it's been well documented that disc degeneration is
not a cause of pain. Yeah, it's the most common
reason we do surgery for back paint. What types of
(07:44):
situations do need surgery. Well, for instance, there's decompression surgery
where you have a pinch nerve. And for instance, if
you have sidetica or pain down your arm and that
particular nerve is being pinched, when you take the prey
us off of that nerve, the results are almost and
sometimes we need don't do the surgery. It's almost impossible
(08:05):
to solve it without surgery. As far as the fusion
for back pain, it's an operation that should never be done,
period should not be done, and I actually equated to
do in frontal lobotomies. There's no data for it. There's
not one research paper in sixty years that says doing
a fusion for back pain makes any sense, particularly since
the reason we're doing the fusion, the degenerated disk. Bone
(08:27):
spurs are threats have been well documented and not being
the start of pain. So for back pain neck pain,
there's tumors and infections and fractures that need to be stabilized. Remember,
fusion takes an unstable segment and stabilizes it. So there
are times to do but that probably happens less than
five percent of the time. The bottom line is fine Jurnty.
(08:49):
For it to be effective, you have to clearly identify
the problem before you can fix it. With back pain,
you don't know where the pain is coming from, and
we do the surgery anyway, and again the data is
as dismal as far as the success of my back
fusion for back pain. So your argument is is that
it has to be something that you can see structurally,
and then that structural has to also match up with
(09:11):
the patient's symptoms. They're feeling correct, And it's not that hard.
I mean, if you go to a dentist with a
painful tooth, you see the cavity and fix it. It
works pretty well, right m But what if you go
to the dentist with this mouth pain and you can't
identify what tooth it is. Maybe it's the gums, maybe
it's the sinuses, who knows what it could be? And
(09:32):
you start doing random procedures. How's that going to work?
You know, not very well? And same thing, you take
a card to the shop. Unless the mechanic makes an
accurate diagnosis as to what their problem is, it starts
to doing random interventions. It doesn't work. It's the same
thing with spine jury. There's some sort of I'll use
the work urban legend that if all else has failed,
(09:53):
let's do surgery. Well, if all of us has failed
for a surgical problem, then do the surgery. I mean
many curticulations, by the way, are solved without surgery. But
at least if every surgicalation that you can see surgeries
and option most spine shurdy that fails is done on
situations that you can't even see the problem one percentage
(10:13):
of people. There's no structural like things that you can
see on an m r I scan. Well, it's just
an estimate. I just see the vast majority of spines
tradition not be done. And again with back pain is
less than five percent you can actually see the problem.
So not a five percent of back pain is coming
from muscles, tendance, ligaments. Who knows where it's coming from,
but it's not coming from something that you can see. Yet,
(10:35):
we're really close, actually upwards of twenty billion dollars a
year doing spine surgeries on normally aging spines. Okay, one
of the things I saw that you said is that
the last five years of neuroscience research has been like
we've made a lot of steps forward. Can you explain
what some of that has taught us? Well, let's go
(10:56):
clear back to my medical school days, which I wish
they had actually taught me this back then. So everybody
knows what phantom limp pain is. Right where you lose
an armor, like because of trauma or infection or diabetes,
and before you lose the arm of the leg, there's
lots of paint. But when you do the amputation, over
half the patients still feel the same pain they had
before the surgery. In other words, the brain memorized the pain.
(11:18):
So the limb is gone, why would the pain still
be there? And remember being a medical student going, well,
that's interesting, but nobody ever explained to me what was
going on. It turns out that with chronic pain that
can occur in any part of the body, can be
with headache, stomach pain, back pain, neck pain, any pain
in the body can be memorized because what you're doing,
you're firing these unpleasant impulses to your nervous system, but
(11:40):
they're coming in so quickly that they get memorized within
about three to six months. So indeed, what happens with
back pain, for instance, they've done a very nice. Starting
in two thousand and fourteen that showed that if you
take a key back pain that becomes chronic, that it
switches from the pain center in the brain to the
emotional center. She had the same pain but a different driver,
(12:01):
and it's now memorized. So just abotter what you do.
Like for instance, if we have phantom leg pain, you
can't do more surgery to leg. This not there. So
what we do we program your brain. You can retrain
your brain to go to parts the brain that don't
have pain. For instance, phantom limp pain, which is something
I did not think it was solvable, is actually quite
solvable with the concepts that neuroscience has showed us the
(12:24):
last five years. So phantom limp pain, we see disappear,
not just to live with it, it actually disappears. All right,
let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. Welcome
back to Prodigy. For more infot in My Dog or
di finding the links mentioned in this episode, visit Prodigy
podcast dot com. Let's jump to what the cause of
that pain is. So what we're finding out that mental
(12:47):
pain is actually a bigger problem than physical pain because
what happens is that your brain processes negative thoughts and
unpleasant emotions the same way they process a physical threat,
same part of the brain, same reaction. What happens when
you're under threat of any kind, mental or physical, that
your boasy creates adrenaline, cortisol, all these different stress hormones,
(13:13):
and then your body's on fire, hyper vigilant. But it
also extremlates the immune system, so your brain actually becomes
inflamed and sensitized. So the problem that humans have is
that you can't escape your thoughts. So these pathways get
laid down, so the mental pain. I think that chronic
pain is a disease of human consciousness that the pathways
(13:34):
get laid down early on in life. It was even
more of a problem that expressed thoughts and emotions is
repressed thoughts and emotions. And that's what got me in
deep trouble personally, is that I'm a major spine surgeon.
I was joking with my wife, but I'm not that
much of a joke. Is that, you know, normal people
don't become spine surgeons. It's not a normal way to
(13:55):
live your life. So it was just an incredible master
suppressing stress just stopped it. I mean, what was I
supposed to do is tremendous stresses. You're on a tight
rope all day long, every day for years, and so
I just stepped it. But at age thirty seven, I
went from being a fearless surgeons to crippling anxiety. In
one day, I had a panic attack. So I thought
(14:16):
anxiety was psychological. I actually went into counseling to try
to solve it. It turns out anxiety is the result
of the threat, not the cause. So I think anxiety
in terms of a psychological issue. We try to fix
it and solve it. But if you think about it,
how long would any of us survive without anxiety? Not
(14:36):
very long. You wouldn't breathe, you went eight, you'd walk
out into the streets. So anxiety is this survival mechanisment
is how we evolves, how we survive. So it's a gift.
But the key to this whole process of what is
called the DC journey Direct your Own Care journey, is
that you understand that anxiety is what you have, it's
not who you are. In the unconscious brain. The survival
(14:59):
response this is about twenty million bits of information per second,
twenty million The conscious brain processes forty zero twenty million
versus forty So you can't do my never matter, which
I did for a long time. You can get away
with it for a while. What you have to do
is simply separate your identity from this reaction and realize
(15:20):
it's a very powerful amoral survival response, and then you
learned to what I call developing working relationship with it.
So it turns out when I offered patients surgery to
get rid of the light pain of their arm pain
versus dropping down their anxiety, they want to get rid
of their anxiety. Almost to the person. So even now
I have ouris of my hips and knees. It's actually
(15:41):
more physical pain than I had back years ago when
I had the chronic pain. But with the chronic pain,
I had the anxiety. I also had seventeen different symptoms
and migraine, headache, stomach itches, back pain, neck pain, burning
on my feet, skin rashes. There's over thirty different symptoms
that occur from your body coming street being off. So
(16:02):
I'm starting it's just a word that describes the state
of being hyper alert, hyper vigilant, and it describes the
body's chemistry. But it's not a psychological issue. And this
is related to the anounced vagus nerve. Right, what I'm
excited about. There's Dr Stephen Porges who now lives in Florida,
(16:22):
but he worked out Indiana for many years. He wrote
a book called the poly vegal Theory. He's been researching
was called the vagus nerve for over forty years. And
the vegas nervous the tenth cranial nerve, which means it's
a nerve that originates directly off the brain, so below
the brain. This was called the mid brain. There are
twelve cranial nerves in the vagus nervous, the tenth cranial nerve.
(16:45):
So it's the autonomic nervous system. And the reason why
it's called autonomic because it's automatically controls everything. Controls your
respiratory rate, sweating, your stomach action, bladder action, blood pressure,
all these things to control by the vagus nerve. So
about sent of us input from the body and about
its output back to the body. So it happens is
(17:05):
that when you were under threat, your immune system is
stimulated to your sympathetic nervous system fires up. You have
tremendous amount of inflammation. The vagas nerve is parasympathetic, which
is strong only antiflammatory. So there's a bunch of interventions
you can do that that directly stimulate the vaguest nerve,
(17:25):
which is very very powerful as far as anti inflammatory effect.
So it turns out that chronic pain, anxiety, depression, by
polar are all inflammatory disorders. I wanted to ask, I
guess you developed a treatment that you, I guess learned
through your own experience. Can you go into a little
bit about what that is? So a whareness is the
first step. The second step is that chronic pain is complicated,
(17:50):
is affected by sleeve stress, exercise, medications, life Outlook, all
these things affect pain, and what we're doing in medicine
were throwing randoms us exclusions at a complex problem. It
can't work, and guess what, it doesn't work. Each person
is a different set of variables. So the second factor
is is that you have to treat every aspect of
(18:11):
it simultaneously, which sounds daunting but actually not so. Once
you understand the three to five variables that are affecting you,
and each one is addressed simultaneously, things start to add up. So,
for instance, sleep is a big deal. So sleep could
add anxiety. Frustration is a big deal because your nervous
system is fired up. Another chiropractic, another, So it's an
(18:36):
additive process. And the third step is the patient has
to take control. In other words, the only person that
can really solve the problem for you is going to
be you. So you take the knowledge, the variables, you
take your particular take on it, and then you'll find
your own solution. So it's very much of a self
directed process. You don't need pain clinics. There's just a
(18:56):
bunch of ways to calm your nervous system response down
in your own chemistry down to help everything results and
the pain really does go away. Well, that's great. I
love when I hear it's not a single simple answer
because to me, that's like always the indicator that it's
bullcrap um. But let's say you're in a situation where
(19:17):
you know you have a stressful job and there's just
it's not like you can avoid it. Like, what would
you do to change your thinking so that you can
reduce that anxiety. That's a great question, because first of all,
stress kills people. You know that, right, I'm just being
well documented. Hundreds of research papers that chronic stress kills people,
but people forget to talk about stressing management with the
(19:39):
stress that's actually damaged into your body is the stress
that you can't control. So it's the chronic stress is
actually the most damaging. And so a huge stress your
body fires up, you calm down and move on. With
chronic stress day after day after day, where there's finances
or a spouse or a job, whatever is going on,
your body is exposed to sustain elevated levels of inflammatory markers.
(20:03):
The biggest stress, by the way, are your thoughts. People
cannot escape their human consciousness, so thoughts are even a
bigger stresser than the circumstances. So the solution principle, and
there's lots of details, but i'll just try to give
it a review, is that stress isn't the problem. It's
your chemical reaction to it. You have a stress or
whatever it is. Avoiding stress fact is impossible. And again,
(20:24):
the stresses that are all damaging the ones that you
cannot control. So what you're doing, there's two things you
can do instead of being stressed. Automatic survival response is
what we're supposed to do. That's what we're automatically programmed
to do. Is go into a survival reaction, so any
threat is met with a survival reaction. The key issue
is called neural plasticity. You're actually stimulating your brain to
(20:46):
change in a different direction, and the new set of
circuits in your brain do not have the same pain pathways,
they do not have the same reactivity. So basically with
neo plasticity, you have these stress the increase in space,
and then you redirect. If you're just trying to redirect
to fight the impulses, you're not gonna win. Remembers, The
(21:07):
mind over matter doesn't work. So we start the process
with a very effective to which is incredibly simple and
actually broke me out of fifteen years of chronic pain.
Is called expressive writing, and there's over a thousand research
papers and documents that it works, and it's not the solution,
but it is the starting point. Where you write your
thoughts on a paper, could be anything positive or negative,
(21:28):
and you instantly tear them up and you can't control
your thoughts, but you can separate from them. So your
thoughts are on the table. You have a space between
you and the thoughts that's now connected with vision and feel,
which are part of the unconscious brain. So from a
neural plasticity standpoint, the first step of solving chronic pain
is called expressive rinning. So what that does accomplishes awareness
(21:52):
in separation in one step, and then the reprogram. It
could be just taking deep breath, drop your shoulders, and
let's go back to the bag as nerve for a second. So,
for instance, slow breathing is anti inflammatory, so you do
express it writing and do some slow breathing of less
than ten breasts per minute it's anti inflammatory. Or you
can do some mindfulness work. We just place your attention
(22:13):
on taste or smell or feel. Again, you've redirected, so
instead of fighting, for instance, unpleasant thoughts, will be redirect
your attention not to distract yourself. Remember you have to
feel the pain first before you can redirect, and then
it's one of the hardest parts of the project is
that if you're just doing these tools to avoid feeling pain,
that's that gonna work. So you have to allow yourself
(22:35):
to feel the pain and then redirect. People don't want
to feel the pain, and it's a it's a large scale.
In other words, it's not about just diving into the
pain and being montro being tough. That's actually very counterproductive.
But there's a word we use called pendulation, which means
you back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,
and you do and deal with the pains. You can
(22:55):
tolerate it in Some days are better than others. One
of the first thing to tell people in don't just
give yourself a break. You're in chronic pain. You should
be angry, you should be frustrated. You are angry, and
you are frustrated. It's not going to disappear tomorrow. But
people get harder themselves and self critic hold they're really frustrated,
and they're blaming the person who hurt them. All those
things fire up the nerveses and where the essence of
(23:16):
the solution is learning how to calm down a nervous system.
So the essence of the problem is onjoid exposure to
a threat mental or physical, with mental being the bigger problem.
And the essence of the solution is finding safety, which
means you've learned the tools to control your body is
neuro chemistry. And once you have those tools to change
your body is neuro chemistry, you're free. All right, let's
(23:40):
take a quick break. We'll be right back Welcome back
to Prodigy for more infot in My Dog, or to
finding the links mentioned in this episode because it Prodigy
podcast dot com. Your new chemistry really does change ner
conduction slows down, the inflammation in your brain drops down dramatically,
your organs function better, your metabolisms better, and pain actually disappears.
(24:05):
It's it's in its shocking. I mean, I'm a surgeon,
and I will tell you historically been one of those
people that when I saw somebody watching my office with
chronic pain, I just sort of rolled my eyes and
go whatever. Because there's a really horrible diagnosis going on
right now, which I'm really upset about. Now. I would
not have been this way twenty years ago. But it's
called medically unexplained symptoms. Have you heard this diagnosis at all?
(24:27):
Uh No, But I'm familiar with people like having that
that type of thing. So the stuff I'm talking about
has been in the medical literature for at least thirty years.
This is not new news. I'm not I'm not discovering
new inventions. I'm not discovering new knowledge. I'm uncovering stuff
that's already there, but for some reason it has not
made it into the main stream medical thinking. So this
(24:48):
has been around for a long time as a body's
response to threat creates a reaction that's unpleasant that forces
you to survive. So again the tools like acupuncture, um
medical no IS, M, d R, all these tef of
things I thought was just crazy. You know, I'm as
certain right, So what you're actually doing is directly stuminity
the vegas nerve. For instance, humming stilates the seventh cranial
(25:11):
nerve which is next to the vegas nerve, and just
humming actually is anti inflammatory. Are these referred to as
some like somatic tools. Yes, so when these are word
medically unexplained symptoms, it's really upsetting to be because everything's wrong.
Your glucosism, your cortisolves up, your heart rates going, Your
inflammatory markets are through this ceiling. The inflammatory markets one
(25:33):
it's called I L six, These interlocent societic kinds are
through the ceiling. Your body is off, everything's wrong. So
the symptoms are completely explained by changes in the body
bodies physiology. The end has been well documented that the
anatomy has little if anything to do with pain, so
that the fact that the medical profession has not come
(25:54):
up with this new term called medically unexplained symptoms. To me,
if you're a patient, of course, how do you think
you feel? You're really just saying, well, we don't know
what's going on. You donna have to live with it,
and sort of imply that you know something. You're just
not You're not that strong, you're not that tough. The
impact of chronic pain has been documented in several research
papers actors have the same impact on a person's life
(26:16):
as having terminal cancer. And my argument, and actually one
of the papers did say this, is that it's actually
worse because with turnal cancer, you know what the diagnosis
is right, and you know there's an endpoint, good or bad.
With chronic pain, you have all the uncertainty. Nobody tells
you the diagnosis, You get bounced around, there's no hope
(26:37):
of an endpoint, and people in chronic paining are absolutely miserable.
And that's why I came up with this ternament that
I think you right, called the abyss. During this dark hole,
there's no bottom, there's no way out. What do you do.
It's a horrible place to live. And I was in
an abyss for at least fifteen years. My understanding is like,
you know, because we don't really understand the brain all
(26:57):
that well, but you're saying that you can take a
look at these patients um and see they're like elevated
stress level. We do know that the automom nerve system
is sort of the like Grand Cetral station directing the traffic.
We know that in the periphery that if you have
an injury to your toe, because since believe not, your
nervysm is actually an extension of your toe, didn't It
(27:18):
did not develop any way around. In other words, you
have one cell bacteria that became to cell for cell whatever.
Eventually these organisms became so big they had to develop
a nervous system to interpret the data. So we have
it backwards. We need the brain developed first. It did not.
It's actually the one cell organisms developed first and it
worked in the direction. So it's your nervous system is
connecting to the body that dog that directs the traffic.
(27:41):
And so that's why don't use the word mind body
of syndrome anymore or psychosymatic, because it's just a unit.
You can't sense pain. Your body can't function without a
nervous system, and vice versa. So it's just a unit
response to the environment and we try to treat it psychologically.
It's just one unit. Know, these these tools that you
(28:02):
use for treating this um at the source, are they
something that you have to do ongoing? Well, become they've
become away life. They're instinctual. So I probably spend I
would say, Okay, I've been this for fifteen years. I've
been pain free now for about fifteen years after starting
for fifteen years. So the things that I it's a
learned skill and you get better better with repetition. But
(28:24):
I always say it's probably ten minutes a day spent
and actually thinking about it. So there's a little too
called express obritings to be right down my thoughts, tear
them up. It's about five or ten minutes at the most,
sometimes thirty seconds. It's called active meditation or simply placed
my attention on another sensation. Happens all day long, three
to five seconds. One tool is not discussing your pain,
(28:45):
no complaining. Well, that's something that that's just don't do.
So the key shoe is awareness when your body is
fart up versus this not then you use these tools
that you've learned to instinctively change directions and pretty soon,
just like any athlete or artists that changed the direction
starts becoming very automatic. So yeah, it's it's a matter
(29:06):
of processing information differently. Going back to your original situate
question about you know, if you have a situation that
you can't avoid, what do you do? Look in you
just on my and then to create that space and substitute.
Then the structure of your brain physically changes, right, so
it becomes more automatic. And um, do you ever, let's
(29:27):
say you have a really really bad day or you
forget to um practice, use your tools, and do you
ever feel pain coming back a little bit all the time? Okay,
So so here's the key is that you see people.
It's a bit of a story, but the bottom line
is is that life comes at us, and life last
week and instantly prey well for a night and the
(29:48):
next day. For instance, lack of sleep one night of
bad sleep has been shown to double people's pain the
next day. And guess what my hypo nie just learning
right up that I felt sort of frustrated and here myself,
so I did to my expressive writing. I went into
this victim mode for me, and so I had to
be four days. I was short of rough, but I
do know what to do. So I, you know, last
(30:10):
night and I could sleep, I did a little expressive writing.
I'm just dropping it down. I'm enjoying talking to you.
So yeah, people think that the goal is to be
pain free in living nirvana, and the goal becomes procticsing
the tools. You don't stay in the hole for very long.
So the day after I recorded that bit with my dad,
I got a phone call from my mom and I
(30:32):
swear I'm not making this up. My dad was having
terrible back pain. He could barely even walk. This all
happened about four months ago. So while editing this episode
and writing this voice over, I gave him a call
to follow up. Well, the pain was intense, you know
what I mean. On the scale of one to ten,
it was like a pen. It almost made me a mobile.
(30:52):
Couldn't couldn't even drag home. It was just a lot
of pain. And I don't know why it was. And
I suspect that maybe I was sitting sort of on
a chair and there's I had been sweating a little
bit and there was a cool breeze coming flying glass
story probably hit my back thinking that might have caused it.
I mean, I don't really know what caused it. I
had no idea. So what did you do? Because you're
(31:14):
feeling better now? Right? Yeah, I'm telling better now, but
I want a bunch of relaxation things. I did some stretching,
I did seven eight physcal therapy sessions. I was in
a lot of pain and it started to go away.
I started I listen. I did a lot of the
SORRYO what a couple of videos that sorrow had put out.
But really I couldn't overcome it. It was too much
(31:37):
pain that I couldn't think it away. Really, I couldn't
think this is something in my mind that I should
I should stop. It just wouldn't happen. Are you a
now now? I'm not a hundred percent fulfill some back
pain every once in a while. I felt some today,
but like today I did when I had the back pain.
The meditation that our relaxation and that really believe in
(32:00):
that helps. Has your position changed at all since, like
you've experienced that pain that you couldn't seemingly care with
purely mental stuff? Yeah? Is it did kind of change
because the first time I had it, you know, five
years ago. Yeah, I was able to just sort of
once I read Sarno's book and realize what it was.
I said that this is it. It is unresolve pain.
(32:23):
And I kept trying to talk myself out of it
and yelling at myself even to get myself back into
and then it stopped. It went away in a few days.
I just think, didn't go away a few days. Just
pack that three weeks and it was a lot of
pain for the three weeks. So yeah, is it? It's
as my position changed, you know. I don't know whether
(32:44):
they think that the timing of my dad's pain means
that the mind body connection is more or less meaningful. Regardless,
I think if you're experiencing chronic pain or anxiety, it's
worth the shot. He clearly is helping some people. I
have like a thing I play computer game and I
use my pinky to hit shift a lot, and that's
like a repetitive motion and so like for physical therapy,
(33:04):
gives me like stretches to do for that. But I mean,
that's just a repetitive motion thing. So was that something
that would show up on a on an m r
I scan or or what do you think that's the
cause of no, And that's what I around about the
human body and the way before I knew much about
chronic pain. Anything about chronic pain is that ninety percent
(33:24):
of all pain and the body doesn't drop in any
imaging tests. That was, if you have rotator cuff pain
maybe shows up an m R I scan, it probably doesn't.
Synthing is back pain, nick pain. So you get these
tissues that are irritated, but nothing will show up in
an m R I scan or any imaging starting for
that matter. But I will tell you that tennanitis is
are probably some most painful pains in the body. And
(33:47):
I guess, like anything I missed or main takeaway that
you want people to get from this, well, I was
trying to recommend. I mean, looking at my book Back
and Control, a surgeon's rodment about a chronic pain gives
you a nice foundation about what to do. And again
the three parts of getting better is awareness, treating every
aspect simultaneously, and then you're taking control. And then there's
(34:08):
two choices. One is called the DC journey dot com
where you can go through a sequence that's been successful
for many many patients. We have watched hundreds of patients
going to pain free. And then I also if you
were come to playing spine surgery. I wrote a book
called Do You Really Need Spine Shurgy? And what it
does is a very detail that formed consenter that really
will clarify your decision making in a way that you
(34:29):
don't make a bad decision. You do not want to
be a failed back surgy patient. You just do not
want to do that. So it's all very self directed.
It is all very doable. None of it's very hard
to understand. I actually quit my surgical practices because I
was watching so much damage being done by procedures that
weren't indicated, and so it's discouraging me that the problem
(34:50):
is that big that I felt compelled to do this
because I love my practice, but I'm also very happy
to watch many many people go to pain free with
really minimal resources. Great. Yeah, I definitely came in as
a skeptic, but I feel convinced. So that was great.
Thank you so much. Yeah, you're welcome, and I obviously
always have to answer more questions. It is a paradigm shift.
(35:11):
Dr Hanscomb has two books out. His first one is
called Back in Control and a second is Do You
Really Need Spine surgery. You can find more info at
back in control dot com. Prodigy was created and produced
by me lowber Anti. The executive producer is Tyler Klang.
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to help out,
you can follow the show on Apple Podcast or share
(35:32):
an episode with a friend. I also really appreciate it
when listeners send me messages and I respond to everyone.
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