Finally hit dat dere 1K posts. I always wanted to contribute in some way since this forum has literally changed my life. I'd talk about something more marketing related, but I feel that a lot of what I have to say would just be a repeat of what other members have preached.
Instead I'm going to share my story of how I overcame the back pain that really fucked me up for over a year.
Cliffs:
-OP gets pwnt by back pain
-Doctors can’t really do much
-OP tries alternative treatments, no luck
-OP discovers real problem (skip to the “Discovering the real problem” section) and gets better.
-Everything went better than expected
Here’s a 20/20 segment about what I'm gonna talk about:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsR4wydiIBI]Dr. John E Sarno - 20/20 Segment - YouTube[/ame]
How it started:
Anyways I remember a lot of threads about gay webmasters getting back pain. I used to scoff at this as something only happening to the older members, but I learned the hard way that I wasn’t as unbreakable as I thought. As some of you may already know, I basically lost my ability to sit for a little over a year.
Just think about it. A person working online who can’t sit for more than 5 min? It pretty much destroyed my working regime.
Here’s jist of what happened to me:
I was convinced that sitting was the culprit. I do 90% of my work on a university campus or at a coffee shop. Most of my day is spent sitting. Now being 6’4 and working off a laptop leads to some caveman style postures. Anyways by now, I literally could not sit for longer than a minute without my back and left leg hurting like someone set it on fire.
At that point I took the pain more seriously. I saw my doctor, got X-rays/bloodwork done. Couldn’t find shit wrong with me. CT scan, couldn’t find anything. It would be a few months before I could finally get a MRI (gg Canadian medical system) and it was noted that I had slight herniations in the affected regions. There was also a slight leak in l4-l5 lumbar discs. Apparently everyone has “some” physical abnormalities with their back, but it doesn’t always lead to pain. Doc said my herniations shouldn’t be causing the pain I was describing. Doc suggested I just dose up on some ibuprofen to mask the symptoms. I did some research and concluded that I didn’t want to go down that road.
Anyways here’s a list of alternative treatments I tried throughout my ordeal:
- Acupuncture – no effect whatsoever
- Chiropractors – It made the pain better for a few hours after each sessions, but it would just come right back.
- Inversion therapy – bought an inversion table, and used it for 5-10 min each morning. This helped the pain a lot. But I eventually hit a plateau.
- Muscle Imbalance therapy – torrented some exercise videos on this. After doing this, my upper back pain was mostly gone. It’d occasionally come back if I was staring at my laptop with my head leaning forward.
Now almost a year after this, and I still hadn’t fully recovered. For about 4 months my progress hit a plateau. The upper back and left arm pain were pretty much gone at this point, but the lower back and left leg still hurt like a motherfucker if I sat for an extended period of time. I could sit now for about 20 minutes before it started to burn.
Discovering the real problem:
So this is what pretty much “cured” me. I shit you not, it was a book. A fucking book.
This one (not aff link):
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connection/dp/0446557684/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354484750&sr=8-1&keywords=healing+back+pain]Amazon.com: Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection (9780446557689): John E. Sarno: Books[/ame]
So wtf is in this book?
Basically the author, Dr.Sarnos, came to the conclusion that many people suffering from chronic back pain without an obvious physical cause could be suffering from what he terms Tension myositis syndrome (Tension myositis syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) or TMS
TMS is sort of like a psychogenic pain, which means physical pain caused by mental, emotional, or behavioral factors. The main culprit in TMS are repressed emotions, ones that your unconscious mind doesn’t want your conscious mind to notice. These emotions are either painful, unpleasant, or embarrassing – in some way unacceptable to us, so we repress them.
A good way for the unconscious to make sure we don’t acknowledge these socially unacceptable feelings, is to distract us with physical pain.
I’m pulling this excerpt from the book to give you an example:
“A man in his forties went to visit his elderly parents in another city. Before the weekend was over, he had a reoccurrence of back pain, the first since completing the TMS therapeutic program a year before. When I suggested that the return of the pain meant that something was bothering him subconsciously, he said the weekend had been pleasant. But then he revealed that his mother was feeble, that he had spent most of the weekend ministering to her needs, and that both of his parents were a worry to him. To make matters worse, they lived a plane ride away. But he was a good man, and his parents couldn’t help it if they were getting old. So his natural (intrinsic, unconscious, narcissistically inspired) annoyance (anger, resentment) was completely repressed and, for reasons that will be clarified shortly, gave rise to the recurrence of back pain.”
Another example involves a father of a new-born who turns out to be a nonsleeper. He develops back pain cause he’s mad at the baby(ridiculous), and is angry at his wife cause she can no longer cater to his emotional needs. He doesn’t know he has those feelings – they are deeply buried in his unconscious, and to make sure they stay there, he gets back pain – TMS.
The solution:
Before I get into this, remember that I’m just paraphrasing from what I learned and speaking from experience. These cliffs don’t substitute reading the book. Also this doesn’t rule out getting a doctor looking at you to rule out anything really serious (like a tumor).
Okay so now you may have some repressed emotions causing TMS style pain, wtf is the solution?
There were some more steps, like psychotherapy or writing down what you think the repressed emotions could be. I personally didn't need any of that, so I can't share any experiences with it.
Within 2 days I was able to sit in 40 minute increments, and only had to stand up due to my back muscles being tired, not cause of pain. Two weeks later I was able to sit and watch the TKDR without feeling like someone stuck a knife in my back.
It’s been a few months now. I can say that the pain is mostly gone. Occasionally I get the tingling sensation in my left leg but that subsides pretty fast.
I highly recommend those of you who are suffering from chronic back pain to check this book out. If you're broke, I know some DDL sites have the ebook version. Just google it.
Instead I'm going to share my story of how I overcame the back pain that really fucked me up for over a year.
Cliffs:
-OP gets pwnt by back pain
-Doctors can’t really do much
-OP tries alternative treatments, no luck
-OP discovers real problem (skip to the “Discovering the real problem” section) and gets better.
-Everything went better than expected
Here’s a 20/20 segment about what I'm gonna talk about:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsR4wydiIBI]Dr. John E Sarno - 20/20 Segment - YouTube[/ame]
How it started:
Anyways I remember a lot of threads about gay webmasters getting back pain. I used to scoff at this as something only happening to the older members, but I learned the hard way that I wasn’t as unbreakable as I thought. As some of you may already know, I basically lost my ability to sit for a little over a year.
Just think about it. A person working online who can’t sit for more than 5 min? It pretty much destroyed my working regime.
Here’s jist of what happened to me:
- 2011 summmer while I’m grinding the grind, I get a tingling sensation on both my left limbs. Left hand, left leg. I just say whatever; it’s not that painful anyways. The pain subsides when I’m standing.
- 2 days later, I get the most excruciating pain in the lower cervical and l4-l5 region of my back. Again, the pain gradually subsides when I’m standing.
- Next day the pain spreads to my left foot and arm. Subsides when I’m standing.
I was convinced that sitting was the culprit. I do 90% of my work on a university campus or at a coffee shop. Most of my day is spent sitting. Now being 6’4 and working off a laptop leads to some caveman style postures. Anyways by now, I literally could not sit for longer than a minute without my back and left leg hurting like someone set it on fire.
At that point I took the pain more seriously. I saw my doctor, got X-rays/bloodwork done. Couldn’t find shit wrong with me. CT scan, couldn’t find anything. It would be a few months before I could finally get a MRI (gg Canadian medical system) and it was noted that I had slight herniations in the affected regions. There was also a slight leak in l4-l5 lumbar discs. Apparently everyone has “some” physical abnormalities with their back, but it doesn’t always lead to pain. Doc said my herniations shouldn’t be causing the pain I was describing. Doc suggested I just dose up on some ibuprofen to mask the symptoms. I did some research and concluded that I didn’t want to go down that road.
Anyways here’s a list of alternative treatments I tried throughout my ordeal:
- Acupuncture – no effect whatsoever
- Chiropractors – It made the pain better for a few hours after each sessions, but it would just come right back.
- Inversion therapy – bought an inversion table, and used it for 5-10 min each morning. This helped the pain a lot. But I eventually hit a plateau.
- Muscle Imbalance therapy – torrented some exercise videos on this. After doing this, my upper back pain was mostly gone. It’d occasionally come back if I was staring at my laptop with my head leaning forward.
Now almost a year after this, and I still hadn’t fully recovered. For about 4 months my progress hit a plateau. The upper back and left arm pain were pretty much gone at this point, but the lower back and left leg still hurt like a motherfucker if I sat for an extended period of time. I could sit now for about 20 minutes before it started to burn.
Discovering the real problem:
So this is what pretty much “cured” me. I shit you not, it was a book. A fucking book.
This one (not aff link):
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connection/dp/0446557684/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354484750&sr=8-1&keywords=healing+back+pain]Amazon.com: Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection (9780446557689): John E. Sarno: Books[/ame]
So wtf is in this book?
Basically the author, Dr.Sarnos, came to the conclusion that many people suffering from chronic back pain without an obvious physical cause could be suffering from what he terms Tension myositis syndrome (Tension myositis syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) or TMS
TMS is sort of like a psychogenic pain, which means physical pain caused by mental, emotional, or behavioral factors. The main culprit in TMS are repressed emotions, ones that your unconscious mind doesn’t want your conscious mind to notice. These emotions are either painful, unpleasant, or embarrassing – in some way unacceptable to us, so we repress them.
A good way for the unconscious to make sure we don’t acknowledge these socially unacceptable feelings, is to distract us with physical pain.
I’m pulling this excerpt from the book to give you an example:
“A man in his forties went to visit his elderly parents in another city. Before the weekend was over, he had a reoccurrence of back pain, the first since completing the TMS therapeutic program a year before. When I suggested that the return of the pain meant that something was bothering him subconsciously, he said the weekend had been pleasant. But then he revealed that his mother was feeble, that he had spent most of the weekend ministering to her needs, and that both of his parents were a worry to him. To make matters worse, they lived a plane ride away. But he was a good man, and his parents couldn’t help it if they were getting old. So his natural (intrinsic, unconscious, narcissistically inspired) annoyance (anger, resentment) was completely repressed and, for reasons that will be clarified shortly, gave rise to the recurrence of back pain.”
Another example involves a father of a new-born who turns out to be a nonsleeper. He develops back pain cause he’s mad at the baby(ridiculous), and is angry at his wife cause she can no longer cater to his emotional needs. He doesn’t know he has those feelings – they are deeply buried in his unconscious, and to make sure they stay there, he gets back pain – TMS.
The solution:
Before I get into this, remember that I’m just paraphrasing from what I learned and speaking from experience. These cliffs don’t substitute reading the book. Also this doesn’t rule out getting a doctor looking at you to rule out anything really serious (like a tumor).
Okay so now you may have some repressed emotions causing TMS style pain, wtf is the solution?
- awareness - Just by learning about the existence of TMS, you’re taking away your unconscious mind’s ability to distract you from repressed emotions.
- resume physical activities - Probably the most difficult. This includes overcoming the fear of bending, jogging, lifting, playing sports etc. It means unlearning the all the nonsense about the correct way you are supposed to bend, lift, sit, stand, lie in bed, etc. I had to unlearn the “proper” way to sit. After I got near the end of the book, I just sat down and slouched in my chair like I normally would have a year ago. Mind = blown when I didn’t get a full on episode even after 20 minutes of sitting. The pain was still creeping up but nowhere near as bad as before. I also disassembled my ghetto stand up desk.
- discontinue all physical treatments - For me, that involved stopping the inversion therapy and chiropractic visits.
There were some more steps, like psychotherapy or writing down what you think the repressed emotions could be. I personally didn't need any of that, so I can't share any experiences with it.
Within 2 days I was able to sit in 40 minute increments, and only had to stand up due to my back muscles being tired, not cause of pain. Two weeks later I was able to sit and watch the TKDR without feeling like someone stuck a knife in my back.
It’s been a few months now. I can say that the pain is mostly gone. Occasionally I get the tingling sensation in my left leg but that subsides pretty fast.
I highly recommend those of you who are suffering from chronic back pain to check this book out. If you're broke, I know some DDL sites have the ebook version. Just google it.
