The mindbody prescription Healing the body, healing the pain

Those who have tension myositis syndrome (TMS) may suffer from a wide variety of problems. TMS supposedly causes rage and fear in the unconscious and may lead to acne, heartburn, allergies, tennis elbow, heart disease, and cancer. It can also result in the formation of antibodies to the microbial causes of such illnesses as Lyme disease, and discovery of those antibodies can lead a physician to misdiagnose the cause of a patient's pain. Sarno has seen 10,000 TMS patients and so speaks with credibility. Too much emphasis is placed, he says, on physical causes of pain and disease. Despite recent downplaying of his pioneering work, Freud had it right, and psychoanalysts today are often the only physicians who can see problems caused by TMS. Successful treatment requires the patient to give up on physical causation and acknowledge TMS as the basis of the problem. Sarno includes statements by enthusiastic patients whose previous doctors failed to help and ends with an 18-page chapter expressly for physicians and academics. (Reviewed April 15, 1998)0446520764William Beatty