- So when I'm saying that there are certain diagnoses
and assessments that are being thought of
as structural when they're actually mind-body,
that's my point of view.
That doesn't mean that
if somebody makes a structural diagnosis,
they say you have Ehlers-Danlos
or chronic Lyme or POTS or whatever,
that that might be helpful to people
because it might be more helpful than saying,
"We don't know. We have no idea what's wrong with you.
It's medically unexplained."
Oh, here's an answer. People want an answer.
We need to know what's going on,
and having an answer can be very helpful,
especially if the answer makes sense.
It's like, "Oh, this explains it. I see what this is."
So there's a reason, there's an explanation,
and then there's techniques to use to help.
Maybe the techniques are physical.
Maybe they're supplements. Maybe they're medications.
Whatever the techniques are,
you have an explanation, you have a technique,
and what if you have a caring person,
someone who's listening and caring for you?
And what if you now have hope and optimism?
Those are powerful things, an explanation, a technique,
a caring and trusted person.
You can trust and believe in what you're saying makes sense,
hope and optimism.
That is the foundation of the placebo effect,
those four things, and the placebo effect,
if you have a mind-body condition, that's all you need.
I'm a placebo doctor. That's what I do.
I have an explanation. I have techniques.
I have trust and caring and compassion
and I have hope and optimism.
We're marshalling the power of the brain,
and there's lots of different ways to do that,
and lots of times people may not benefit at all
from what I have to offer, but they may benefit
by what somebody else has to offer,
and so I'm not trying to denigrate
or say these other ways are wrong or bad.
I'm saying that they're often working
by mechanisms that have to do with the brain
and not by the mechanisms that they may think
they're operating on, but that's okay. (laughing)
If it works, it works. I'm happy.
I don't want people to suffer. Does that make sense?
So now how do we distinguish one category from the other
now that we have a rough idea?
First we rule out the structural problem,
which means basically doing typical evaluation,
typical evaluation.
There's no cancer, no fractures, no inflammatory disease,
no autoimmune disease, no whatever,
or you have the disorders that I just mentioned
that are typically mind-body disorders like,
in my opinion again, like SIBO, chronic Lyme disease,
irritable bowel, tension headaches, chronic fatigue,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
all the ones that are most commonly mind-body disorders,
but that's not enough.
What we wanna do is step two,
rule in a neural circuit disorder so we can be certain,
and that's my goal, to be certain,
to have the evidence for that person, not just general,
"Oh, you have irritable bowel.
Okay, we know irritable bowel is mind-body.
That's all we need to do."
No, I wanna do more than that.
I wanna take the next step, rule in a mind-body
or neural circuit or neuroplastic disorder.
So most of these problems are mind-body to start with.
We already talked about that.
The medical testing is not showing something
that's clear and obvious.
No obvious nerve damage. The neurologic exam is normal.
No obvious spine damage.
The MRI shows just the normal abnormalities, et cetera.
We know this. We've talked about that as well.
So we're not over-diagnosing things
just because there's some abnormalities on an MRI
that are normal abnormalities.
The same is true for shoulders and knees and hips.
A lot of people have mild abnormalities
that are commonly seen in normal people,
but how do we really know?
So this is the most important assessment,
and this assessment can be done by anyone.
You don't need a medical degree
to do what I'm gonna talk about right now,
and it's the most important part of the assessment.
There's two parts to it: circumstantial evidence,
and confirmatory evidence.
It's like a legal case.
Circumstantial evidence, it points to the problem,
but confirmatory evidence is like the DNA in the legal world
where we know that that's what happened.
We have a new book.
The PPDA, the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association,
has a book that just came out a few months ago,
and it's a list of hundreds of diagnoses
and giving people a sense of
what they're most likely to be in this category,
that category or not sure, and it's like,
it's called "A Guide to Psychophysiologic Disorders".
It's available on Amazon, and Dr. Clarke,
David Clarke is the editor of it, and I helped.
So the circumstantial evidence is this: body map.
So I ask people to fill out the check.
Where do you have pain in your body now?
And then you can do another one,
where have you had pain in your body in your lifetime?
And when you find it's just one area,
well, maybe there's a problem in that area.
That makes sense, but when you find 10 areas,
it's circumstantial evidence more likely
that it's a mind-body problem,
especially over the course of a lifetime,
and then people can colour in the areas where it's painful,
and lots of times I see these maps
where this whole side of the body
is all coloured in, or this whole,
from the trunk all the way down is coloured in,
or the whole torso, the whole back.
Just looking at that, you can be pretty sure
that's gotta be a mind-body condition
'cause there's very few medical disorders
that cause pain in such a wide area or in so many areas.
Okay? It just points in that direction.
So the second thing, and now here's a checklist of disorders
that are commonly mind-body disorders,
like irritable bowel, ulcers,
heartburn, tension headaches, migraine headaches,
anxiety, depression, OCD, eating disorders,
insomnia, et cetera, right?
And so all people have to do is check.
This is your lifetime.
Which of these have you ever had in your lifetime?
And when you see a lot,
most of my patients have lots of checks.
That makes sense, circumstantial evidence pointing
in that direction.
If you have only one check, well,
yeah, you could have a problem in that area,
but when you have lots of checks, then you can say,
"Gee, circumstantially more likely this person has a history
of mind-body problems going all the way back
to their childhood."
If you're having headaches as a child, why is that?
Children are canaries in the coal mine.
Do you know that expression?
Canaries in the coal mine,
it's an alarm system for a problem in the,
you put a canary in the coal mine,
and then if there's not enough oxygen, the canary dies,
and you say, "Oh, we need more oxygen in here,"
or whatever, right?
So children in our family and in a society
when they get sick, there's a problem.
Those are the little, the kids in Sweden.
They were a canary in the coal mine.
There was a problem, from their point of view,
in the Swedish country.
You see what I'm saying?
So when you can go back and you can look at people's lives
and see what happened to them as children,
why were you getting headaches when you were a child?
I wanna know that because that's gonna be important
to understand where you are now.
That's the value of looking at their whole life,
and then so what happened as a childhood?
In this, what happened in this teen years?
You started getting TMJ.
TMJ, can't talk, can't speak.
Well, what is it maybe you need to say or can't say
or should or wanna say or you're hiding
or you're covering up or there's a secret?
There may be a reason for that,
and then what happened in 1981?
What happened through?
So now you have a roadmap for seeing,
looking at linkages between stressful life events
and the onset of different pain
or different mind-body conditions,
and then now people can begin to understand their life,
understand why they got these things
at different points in their life.
That's an amazing revelation when you can understand
why this happened as opposed to just bad luck.
"Oh, you got headaches when you were a child."
"Yeah, I must've been allergic to something or I must've,
you know, there was something in the air,
you know, just bad luck or just bad genes."
"Oh, well, then you got these other things
when you were a teenager."
"Yeah, just I was bending too much
or I was playing sports too much or."
"Well, you got these other things
when you were in your twenties."
"Yeah, I wasn't on the right diet, you know?"
So there's always some explanation
that might be a physical explanation,
but if you look at what's going on in their life,
what's going on in their mind, their heart,
their emotions, their families, et cetera,
it's usually not that hard to find those connections,
and I'll show you an example of that in a minute on a video.
So we're looking at life stress by age childhood.
Parents are critical maybe.
Parents are critical and parents are fighting.
So there's a danger signal going on in the brain
but maybe no symptoms at all
because that's normal for that child.
That's all they know, but then they get into
their teen years and then they get in romantic relationships
and then they get betrayed, they get hurt,
and then the danger signal goes higher
and maybe they start to have tension or migraine headaches,
and then in their twenties, then they get married,
but their spouse turns out to be cheating or running around
or abusive or neglectful or critical,
and then the danger signal goes higher,
and then maybe there's irritable bowel or pelvic pain,
and then maybe they get divorced
but now there's some struggles,
and then they get in a little fender bender car accident,
and the car accident causes
some soft tissue disruption or damage,
but then the pain gets worse and worse
and the danger signal's going higher in the brain,
and now there's neck pain and the pain goes
all the way down to the lower back,
and then maybe there's anxiety
or depression or widespread pain,
and now the person feels like they're totally broken
'cause they've got all these checks.
They've got all these things wrong with them.
So I'm totally broken, and the narrative is like,
"I had lotta life stress and I had a lot of
all these physical conditions, not related,
but all these physical conditions, bad luck, more bad luck.
I went to the doctors and all the therapists
and no one could help me and I'm totally broken
and it's never gonna get better."
What a horrible narrative,
but what if the narrative is different?
What if the narrative is you had life stress
that caused your brain to be alarmed,
and you had more life stress that caused this to happen
and more life stress to cause this to happen
and more life stress to cause this to happen.
So there's a reason why you have these things,
and it's not your fault.
They're things that happened to you,
and the doctors couldn't figure it out
because they didn't understand.
They called it medically unexplained,
but there's an explanation for it,
and the brain is neuroplastic and it can change
and you can get better because there's an explanation.
There's techniques that we use
that we're gonna talk about the next two days.
There's a trusting and caring person
who's gonna guide you through this process,
and there's hope, components of the placebo effect,
marshalling their own brain to get better,
and who's the hero of this story?
They are. They're the hero of this story.
They're the one who can empower themselves. That's amazing.
It's a whole different way of thinking of it.
So we're looking for the linkages and earlier life events.
When you go to, you know, like, later in life,
sometimes the trigger that causes the brain
to turn on something can be very small because the brain,
the danger signal's been sensitised
so many times over the years that it can be a small thing
like an anniversary or a holiday or something
that triggers the brain, that reminds the brain,
the subconscious brain of all these other things,
but when you look back at children,
when the children's having stomach pain or headaches,
it's usually very easy to say,
"What was going on in your life?"
And one of the questions that David Clarke always likes
to ask, which I love, he's saying, "Well," and they say,
"No, my childhood was really fine.
You know, it was nothing special.
You know, everyone's childhood has some issues, right?"
And he'll say, "Well, would you want your child
to be living, to go through that,
exactly what you went through?
How would you feel if it was your child going through that?"
And they'll go, "No, I don't think that would be good,"
and then there's all these internal pressures
that people tend to put on themselves.
People who put pressure on themselves,
they tend to be self-critical,
blaming themselves, high sense of duty,
feel like they always have to do something right,
put everybody else first, never put themself first,
never say no, always say yes,
take responsibility for everybody else,
overly conscious, overly caring.
Does that sound like anybody you know?
I mean everybody has these to some degree, of course,
and they're generally good things.
They're good, caring people, but when you're young
and if you have a difficult childhood,
what's your response likely to be?
How's the child gonna feel?
Parents get divorced. Who does the child blame?
Themself. Does that make sense?
Of course not, but children can't risk
attachment to a parent.
The attachment is their lifeline. That's what children do.
They have to have that attachment,
so they blame themselves in some way
or they try to be good.
They try to fix the problem. They're the ones who mediate.
The parents are arguing. What's the child gonna do?
Child can't stop them.
Child can't say, "Stop," doesn't have the power.
What can the child do?
The child can be good all the time
to not provoke any argument.
Child can be perfect.
Child can take on all responsibility,
do more work around the house,
and sometimes the child will get sick,
not because they wanna be sick.
Their brain sees that getting sick,
getting headaches, getting stomach pain,
how is that gonna solve the problem?
It will solve the problem temporarily
'cause the parents will stop fighting
and pay attention to the kid,
and the kid will, as you say, get attention,
will get some loving and caring
'cause the parents are busy, you know, whatever, right?
Do you see what I'm saying?
So these are normal adaptive responses that children get,
but as they grow up, they continue this way.
They continue to be giving kindness to everybody else
but not kindness to themselves,
putting pressure on themselves, calling themselves a loser,
calling themselves not good enough, right?
Did you ever read any Brene Brown type stuff?
She writes about this all the time
very eloquently, very beautifully,
and these internal pressures are on top
of the external pressures in life
that put more pressure on the danger signal in the brain
and make it more likely to produce
these mind-body syndromes or conditions,
and again, this helps people understand it.
It helps people. It makes sense.
"Oh yes, I'm always this way."
When you look at these and you find these things,
it doesn't prove that it's a mind-body condition
'cause everybody has some of these, of course,
but it helps people understand and it serves as a map
or a guideline of how you can help people going forward,
how the symptoms, the conditions can be a message,
can be a guide and to say,
"Huh, if I actually said no once."
I used to say it's like a magic word.
N-O, N-O. It's a magic word.
Sometimes you say, "No, I can't do that."
How does that feel? Well, it's horrible.
I said no, but how does it really feel inside?
It's like, yeah, I said no. (laughing)
Took me a long time to say no.
I'm pretty good at it now. It's great.
It's important to be able to be authentic and be yourself,
and if you're not authentic and you can't be yourself,
then you can fall prey to these.
Does that make sense?
So it's part of this "pain is a gift" kind of message.
So these personality traits are the same kind of things,
overly responsible, et cetera,
all these high expectations, wanting to be good,
feeling guilt, holding thoughts or feelings in,
et cetera, rule following.
They were necessary. They were protective.
They were unavoidable, but you can change.
So we look for the situations in life
that cause children's brain
to start feeling unsafe or in danger,
and everything's about just feeling safety
or feeling endangered, and that's symptoms or no symptoms,
safe or in danger.
And a lotta people grow up with some of these ACEs,
adverse childhood events, and do fine and do well.
It's not everybody has PTSD because of it.
A lotta people grow up, they have a lot of ACEs,
but they had someone who cared for them,
somebody who looked out for them,
somebody that helped them be resilient.
The idea is that we're helping people
not to say that these didn't happen
or they're not important but to say they did happen,
they are important and they did affect you.
Often they did affect you in profound ways,
but look where you are.
You're here and your brain is still neuroplastic,
and you're not broken.
You can survive. You can grow.
You can change.
You can have post-traumatic growth
and learn from these experiences, and a lotta people do.
Obviously if you have a difficult parent,
you learn to be a different kind of parent.
You learn to be a better parent
than your parent was, et cetera.
So it's part of helping people
to see their journey as a hero,
see their struggles as a hero's journey along the way.
So we're asking people
what their childhoods were like, et cetera.
So that's all the circumstantial evidence.
Any questions about that?
It's the body map. It's the other syndromes.
It's the linkages, looking at the life,
the relationship between stress and different disorders,
looking at the personality traits,
looking at the adverse childhood events,
showing empathy and caring for them along the way,
helping to model for them, 'cause a lotta times,
people have difficulty showing kindness to themselves.
I mentioned that a minute ago,
and so part of our job is to show kindness.
When someone says, "Yeah, when I was a kid,
my sibling was beating up on me all the time,"
and that's an opportunity for us to say,
"Wow, that's horrible."
"Yeah, yeah. That's just the way it was."
"Yeah, but I'm sorry for that.
That must've been hard I mean,"
and just take a second to say,
and they may be able to say, "Yeah, that was hard,"
and sometimes they may tear up a little bit
as they begin to show some compassion for themselves,
and when you get people to show compassion for themselves
just as part of talking with them,
as part of listening to their story, that's healing.
That's part of the treatment.
Okay, so this is the confirmer. This is the DNA.
This is the part where you can be certain
when you see these factors.
Functional is a medical term, as I said yesterday,
which means non-structural.
Functional means it's physiologic, not pathologic.
Functional means it's a mind-body condition,
and so number one, the symptoms begin
without any physical precipitation.
"I woke up with it. I must have slept wrong."
I said that a million times,
but research shows you don't injure yourself sleeping.
You don't. I've watched a lotta people sleep. (laughing)
So waking up with a symptom or having a symptom
wake you up in the middle of the night
is usually because you're asleep at night but your brain,
the subconscious part of your brain is awake at night.
How do we know the subconscious is awake at night?
'Cause we dream, and everyone dreams every night.
You may not remember your dreams,
but everyone dreams every night,
and what was going on in our mind
if we're going to bed thinking about,
worrying about something,
even if we're not aware we're worrying about it,
our brain may be aware of it,
and at some point in the middle of the night,
it may wake you up with pain.
It's happened to me several times,
may wake up with pain in the morning.
It's happened to me many times.
Usually that's not a physical injury. Makes sense.
Symptoms that persist after an injury is healed.
You had the injury, the car accident with the whiplash,
heals in about a week, two weeks.
How long does it take a fracture to heal?
Six weeks, not that long. A fracture, six weeks.
Soft tissue injuries, they say those can take longer. Fine.
So it takes two months or three months,
six months at the very most, but two years, five years?
No, it's healed.
Scars, surgical scars heal
in usually two to four weeks.
Okay, so any pain that occurs
after an injury are healed, this persists.
When someone gets injured, and people always ask,
"Well, how do I know? You know, I could have an injury."
Of course you can have an injury.
People get injured all the time.
When you get an injury, swelling occurs, pain goes up,
swelling goes down, pain goes down, injury heals.
You know, it takes a few days, a few weeks, whatever,
but if you get the injury and then the pain just persists
or it gets worse over time, even when you're resting,
that's your brain, right?
Not that hard to figure out, just common sense.
Symptoms are symmetric.
The brain is really good at creating symptoms
that start in this hand 'cause I was doing this
and then it went to that hand,
but I wasn't even using that hand very much.
That's weird. Yeah, that's your brain telling you.
And what I tell people is your brain is not trying
to betray you or torment you or hurt you.
It's trying to alarm you.
It's saying, "Hello, it's me.
I'm up here. Here, (laughing) this is the problem.
I'm causing this and I'm gonna make it go
all over your body if you don't listen," right?
If you're trying to tell somebody and they don't hear you,
what do you do?
You talk louder and louder and louder,
and that's what the brain is doing.
Symptoms occur the whole side of the body.
Like, there's no diseases that cause pain
in the whole side or the whole side of the face
or the whole back of the head or whole top of the head
or the whole arm.
If you have a disc pressing on a nerve,
it's gonna cause pain in the inside of the arm
or the outside of the arm but not the whole arm.
It would have to be all these nerves,
very unlikely that would happen.
So symptoms that occur in a wide area are mind-body.
Symptoms that spread over time,
started in the neck and then spread
all the way down the spine, started on this shoulder,
spread all the way down, that's your brain.
Symptoms that radiate.
If it hurts in here and then radiates to the other side,
like you press here and it's, oh yeah,
this hurts all the way down to my right arm,
well, the nerves here actually go to your left arm,
not to your right arm, so then that's your brain.
So your brain's trying to help you.
It's trying to alert you and tell you.
Symptoms occur in many different parts of the body
at the same time and especially ones that are tingling,
electric, burning, numb, hot, cold.
Those are very common mind-body symptoms, okay?
So now most people are not gonna have all of these,
but if they have one, two, a couple, bunch of 'em,
yeah, it's all giving you evidence
that it's a mind-body disorder, okay?
So I want you to know I ask every patient about
every one of these 'cause this is the investigation.
This is the ruling in, okay?
Secondly, is it inconsistent?
Inconsistency shows it's the brain
because neural circuits can turn on and off,
wipe on, wipe off.
Structural disorders don't turn on and off.
If you break your arm, the pain doesn't turn on
and then turn off and then turn on again.
Did I tell you about the woman who went to Hawaii
and her pain totally disappeared for a week?
This was a doctor, a person I know now,
but she was a doctor in California,
and she was working hard and overwhelmed and COVID hit
and she was typing and her hand started hurting
and then the other hand and then the arm
and the other arm and the whole both arms,
and it got worse and worse, and even when she walked,
she couldn't, and she could hardly type,
and she kept trying to work and work and work,
and then finally she had a vacation.
She went to Hawaii on vacation.
Pain completely disappeared for one whole week.
She came back to work. Pain got even worse than before.
That's all anyone would need to know.
If you know that, just that little fact,
that tells you this is a mind-body condition.
Did her doctors ask her that? No.
Did anyone ask her that? No.
She told me right away,
and no doctor could figure out what was wrong with her,
and this went on for three years,
and she had to quit working.
She had to stop being a doctor
because this pain was so severe.
She left California.
She moved back home with her mom in Arkansas,
and she found my website and she read the website,
and in one day of reading the website,
her pain was 50% better in one day
just from reading that material
because it made sense to her, it explained to her.
It changed the neural circuits in her brain,
and in three weeks, her pain was completely gone
after three years of pain and having to quit her work,
but the clue in that one week in Hawaii,
that was the diagnosis,
and anybody can find that if you look for it.
So the symptoms shift from one part
when it starts here sometimes and then it moves here,
or it moves, it hurts here sometimes,
and then it hurts here.
This is a neural circuit.
This neural circuit's turning on and then turning off,
and then this neural circuit's turning on and turning off,
and what I tell people is you have a soundboard
in your brain like a DJ has with all the different tracks
or dials that go up and down,
and your brain can turn on one, turn off the other,
make a bunch of 'em ramp up, a bunch of 'em go down,
and that's what's happening,
and that's neural circuitry in action
'cause the symptoms are shifting around,
shifting around by time of day.
It's worse in the morning, better in the afternoons.
Why is it always better in the afternoon?
Why is it always worse in the morning?
That's a conditioned response.
That's a habit that your brain has fallen into.
Symptoms are not there, but then when I think about 'em,
they, oh, I haven't had that problem.
Oh, now it's hurting.
That's your brains paying attention.
It's how the neural circuits work.
Symptoms that occur after an exercise but not during.
This is really common.
So sometimes the brain will, you'll be, say, walking.
It feels okay or a little exercise feels okay,
and then afterwards, oh, the pain goes like this.
Is it because you did so much and you injured yourself?
No, it's because the neural circuit's turned off then,
and then the brain is like, "Oh, you shouldn't do that.
Don't do that. Pain."
'Cause the brain is afraid of that activity.
It's not that you're afraid of it. I love gardening.
I wanna garden, but your brain is seeing that activity
as harmful, as dangerous for whatever reason
because that's what it learned.
Symptoms occur more with stress.
Symptoms can go away when on vacation
or engaged in something else.
If your shoulder's broken, it's gonna hurt when you move it,
and it'll stop hurting when you rest it
if your arm is broken.
If you have a mind-body condition with your arm,
it may be fine when you exercise,
but it may hurt when you rest.
That tells you it's a mind-body condition.
It's the opposite of what a structural problem,
how a structural problem would act,
and then the symptoms will go away
when you get some kind of other activity,
a massage, an adjustment, a herb, a reiki, an acupuncture.
All these things are working on the brain.
I studied acupuncture in China in 1982.
3 months I lived in Beijing and studied acupuncture,
and I came back and I would do the needles,
and some people would have this miraculous,
amazing recovery.
Other people have none, no recovery at all.
It didn't make sense,
and it turns out acupuncture works on the brain.
It's a good thing.
I'm not saying it's bad,
but the research shows that there's no difference
between giving real acupuncture and sham acupuncture,
and then finally, triggered,
so symptoms that are triggered by innocuous stimuli.
When the symptoms are triggered by food, smells, lights,
sound, computer screens, weather, cold, rain, wind,
these are likely to be mind-body conditions,
and we have other ways of diagnosing this
that I'm gonna show you tomorrow,
especially when they're inconsistent,
and so sometimes people say,
"Yeah, sometimes I go out in the wind, it doesn't bother me,
and then other times I go out in the wind
and I have this horrible pain."
So you're seeing the triggering by an innocuous stimuli
'cause wind doesn't cause damage to our bodies.
Rain does not cause damage to our bodies.
Low pressure centres do not cause damage to our bodies.
They cause the brain to react
as a conditioned response like Pavlov's dogs,
and then the symptoms are triggered
by even imagining the activity,
and I'll show you some examples of that tomorrow.
So functional, inconsistent and triggered.
When you learn these,
and here's a little checklist for people,
functional, inconsistent and triggered,
and this is how you assess
and diagnose people for mind-body disorders,
how you rule in and confirm a mind-body condition,
and this afternoon after lunch, we're gonna have cases,
and you're gonna assess all these cases on paper
in little small groups of three or four people each,
and you'll be tested to see how easy it is,
most of the time, not all the time,
but most of the time how easy it is
to find these conditions, and if you don't believe me,
now you can look at this patient from that point of view.
You can see pain, 11 years, headaches,
depression, the accident, pain for two days.
Later developed other pains. Spreading pain over time.
History of mind-body disorders going back.
No physical explanation.
The physical treatments are not working.
More stress. More stress.
History of childhood trauma.
The pain comes and goes over the course of the day.
The neck pain hurts sometimes during the day
and not other times during the day.
Neural circuitry in action. That's all you need to know.
The pain is worse when it's cold or rainy.
Conditioned response. Pavlov's dog.
The lower back pain that shifts from the right side
of the back to the left side of the back.
Sometimes on the right side.
Sometimes it's on the left side.
Neural circuit on, neural circuit off,
neural circuit on, neural circuit off,
switching back and forth.
The pain radiates. It's spreading, moves up, moves around.
The pain is worse in certain chairs but not other chairs.
Sitting, it's not always sitting.
It's this chair but not that chair,
and we have other tests for that
that I'll show you tomorrow.
So to me, this is very obvious.
This is purely a mind-body disorder.
This is a story. I'm not gonna read the whole story.
We don't have time, but this is a doctor,
a psychiatrist, actually, and he was having this back pain,
and he had an MRI which showed abnormalities of the back,
and he was really worried about that,
and it's not getting any better.
The doctors told him it was a disc problem.
He emailed me, and I said,
"Well, Richard," his name is Richard,
"do you have any inconsistencies in the pain?
Is there anything that points to
where it's actually a mind-body pain or not?
Let's investigate.
Let's look, see if we can find the truth here,"
and he said, "Well, I said
there's no inconsistencies at all."
Okay, fine.
It seemed very predictable and very mechanical, and I said,
"Okay, let's keep looking. Let's see what happens.
Keep watching," and so then he keeps watching.
He said he had pain when he was walking.
So one of the things I like to say is,
"The Reign of Pain Lies Mainly in the Brain,"
right, "My Fair Lady".
So he was starting to sing,
"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,"
and he started singing when he was walking.
He started feeling a little bit better.
I said, "Oh, that's interesting. That's some evidence.
Let's see if that makes sense,"
but he was still worried about it,
and then I told him some other things,
"Try this, try that," and that didn't help,
and I said, "Look for any anomalies of experience,"
and then he said quite unexpectedly a couple days later,
"I found one!
I was taking a cup of tea upstairs,
and I noticed my sciatic pain is
definitely worse carrying a cup of tea
than when I'm not carrying a cup of tea,"
(audience laughing)
and he was thinking like, why is that?
I mean, is the carrying the cup of tea changing the nerve?
You could argue, and he said, "Now this was not,
I was carrying not a big 10-gallon cup.
It was a normal tea cup and I knew
there was no way the weight of the tea on its own
could compress a nerve enough to cause pain.
Initially I said to myself that the extra care I took
in not spilling the tea was causing the pain,"
and then he said, "Ah ha!
If I was tensing about my concern of causing that pain,
that tension was coming from my brain.
It wasn't my back that said 'Don't spill the tea.'
It was my brain."
So he had this little moment with carrying the cup of tea
that helped him to think, huh, this is my brain.
"From that moment on, I realised with certainty
neural circuitry was involved in my situation,
and from this moment on, I began to heal."
That was his turning point in this pain
that he had had for several years.
"To get over the fear,
I made myself walk the same distance every morning."
He started walking. He started doing things.
He did a lotta the stuff we'll talk about tomorrow,
and his pain completely went away.
He even was able to go on a trip.
He was even able to carry luggage,
and he said, "I'm gonna do it.
Two weeks later, I was playing tennis.
The pain was over, has not recurred since."
The certainty, the assessment,
the understanding came from a little moment in time,
and that was enough to give him the knowledge
that he was okay, and that made all the difference.
"For each illness the doctors cure with medication,
they can provoke 10 illnesses in healthy people
by inoculating them with a virus
that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe:
the idea that one is ill."
When we think we're ill, causes a lotta changes in the brain
that can make things worse.
This is a woman I just, two weeks ago,
she emailed me and she said,
"I'm incredibly thankful for your work.
Since I came across your talks,
my pain has decreased by about 70% just by learning."
Her first idea was,
"I don't believe I have a mind-body problem,"
and she looked more and listened more and investigated more,
and then she said, "Well, I'm sceptical,
but maybe it's possible, but I'm still sceptical,"
and then she read more, and then she said,
"You know what? I think this can help.
But I'm not sure how much it can really help,"
and then she said, "I'm so sure that I am completely
in charge of my recovery," and then finally to the feeling,
"I will get better."
You see that change in mindset over time,
change in mindset over time,
becoming more and more certain
by gaining more and more evidence,
by learning more and more,
by seeing the changes as you begin to do this work,
and that can make all the difference.
The most powerful things that we have are our beliefs,
our stories, our mindset, and our compassion,
and we're privileged to be able to hear these from people
and engage with them and care for them
and teach them and love them, and Gloria Steinham said,
"The truth will set you free,
but first it'll piss you off." (laughing)
TMS is the mind-body that Dr. Sarno used those term.
This guy says, "I'm deeply grateful for this.
It's a diamond that has forged in the fires
that offers you an opportunity to finally
and take a stand as your own best friend.
I believe in my heart of hearts
I will never betray myself again.
I've earned my self-respect.
I will land on my feet because I found
a home within myself."
He used these illnesses, these ailments
to help himself find himself, be his authentic self,
believe in himself, trust himself,
care for himself, take care of himself,
and it's, again, all about compassion.
Thank you. (laughing)
(audience applauding)