Dr. Jeff Axelbank

often I will say to people, if we weren't talking about this pain, what would we be talking about if we were to put this aside? What are the emotional issues? What's going on in your life? What are the memories that this is a distraction from?

Stiff neck was an experience was there since he was a teenager. no. it was not because of his sleep position. it was something deeper than that and those pains accompanied him for 3 decades. how he healed a chronic pain that lasted 30 years?

It all started at:

when I was an adolescent, I think I'm maybe 13, and felt in a body of 1415 years old, I would often wake up or have a stiff neck that was very painful.my mother would always say, oh, you must have slept wrong. I see something about the position that you slept, and this would happen periodically. I had all these episodes, right. then as I became an adult, they happen kind of pretty regularly. And I went to a chiropractor and the chiropractor told me I had subluxations in my spine that needed to be adjusted and that I should come see him once or twice a week for prevention so that I wouldn't have these episodes. so I did that. also people there's this controversy when you have pain, should you use heat or should you use cold? So I tried heat and I tried cold. I guess they worked in a kind of temporary kind of way.

Main symptoms were:

in fall of 2002. I had what I call the mother of all back spasms, and I was really kind of laid up. In a sense. It was like the other episodes, but about 50 times worse. And I was sort of flat out on my back, couldn't really move, couldn't do anything in extreme pain. And I did what I've always done. I went to the chiropractor who now told me I should come two or three times a week and also took a lot of Advil. And I did a lot of ice and it didn't get better. And then a very scary thing happened. I started getting these shooting pains down my arm, which was pretty scary. And I went to my doctor who I love. And he said he had me take off my shirt and he looked at my back and he said, oh, your back is already starting to atrophy. I can see the muscles are atrophying. And he warned me that. Well, actually, first, he said, let's have an MRI and see, we took the MRI and the MRI showed degenerative disk disease.

the dark verdict of docrors

I had herniated discs protruding discs, and they were impinging on the nerve coming down my arms, he said, and he warned me that if I wasn't careful, if I didn't treat this, I was going to end up with an arm that was not alive. He told me, basically nonsteroidal antiinflammatory medication, muscle relaxers, physical therapy, continue the chiropractor and also be very careful. I shouldn't swim anymore because swimming was putting a strain on my neck or riding a bicycle, which involves leaning over the handlebars. I shouldn't do that. And I shouldn't run because running is impact on the spine, and that's going to make it worse. I did all these things for a couple of months and nothing worked

I tried these modalities but they did not cure me:

Nsaids, chiropractors, PT, heat and ice- nothing helped

Dark night of the soul:

I think that time at the point that my sister in law called me, that was my low point because I was doing it. I was a good boy. I was doing everything. The doctor told me I was doing physical therapy and I was doing chiropractic, and I was taking the medication and I was not doing money, but it wasn't helping. And so I was hopeless. I had even in my office. You can't see here, but I have a nice, comfortable chair that I sit when I see patients. I wasn't using that chair because it was too painful. I had moved a hard backed chair because that was better for my pain. And I was thinking, like, I have to really change my life here. I loved swimming. I loved biking, I liked to be active, and I was thinking, Well, maybe this is it. Maybe I'm just getting too old. You said earlier when I said the diagnosis was degenerative disk disease, and your comment was, oh, my God, so young. But actually, degenerative disk disease is actually quite normal. And it begins happening in the 20s. And there's research that shows that people who do not have any pain have this condition, this supposed disease degenerative disc disease. But it's actually a normal aging, and it does not cause pain. did you feel despair? Well, I think that there's a way in which my stoicism prevented me from actually having that kind of a despair. I was going to adapt. So it's more like there was a kind of a loss, a feeling of loss. I had to think about changing my life, and it was very sad. It wassensation, even of grieving the loss.

Change in the plot:

one day I get a phone call from my sister in law, who is a hairdresser, and she calls me, and she says, So, Jeff, how are you? I said, I'm doing okay. And she said, Well, how can you say you're doing okay? When? And I thought she was going to say, how can you say you're doing okay when your back is this kind of problem? But what you said was:

how can you say you're doing okay when your daughter just got diagnosed with type one diabetes?

Oh, my God. And I was like, what? Wait, what? And so she explained to me Sarno's ideas, and she sent me a copy of Sarno's book, Healing Back Pain. And I read it. And at first I was like, But I have the MRI. I could show you the MRI. The MRI shows very clearly the bulging discs. The protruding disks are right there on the MRI. But I started to notice things. I started to notice that first of all, the pain went up and down. It wasn't constant. And I started to notice that it varied with what I was thinking about, not so much what I was doing. And so I started as a psychologist. I was working as a psychologist. It started to kind of make some sense to me.

three pillars of his treatment

I started to do what Sarno calls the three pillars of his treatment, which is number one, think psychological, not physical. So in other words, it's not how I slept or it's not. A lot of people say. I reached for the soap in the shower and my back seized up. It must have been how I bent down or I was lifting a bag of something. And that's what did it no think. What were you thinking? What was going on in your life at that time? What were the stresses? What was on your mind, even if it wasn't on your conscious mind, what was going on? Think about your life. Think psychological, not physical. That's the first thing. The second pillar is to stop all medical treatments. And so I started to wean myself off of the muscle relaxers and the antiinflammatory medication. Well, what it is - is it reinforces it, reinforces your brain to think that it's a physical problem, right? And all the time you're reinforcing it, it just perpetuates it. So I stopped doing all that. And the third pillar is resume normal activities as soon as possible. And so I remember very clearly the first time that I jumped into the swimming pool. And the other thing that Sano says is often the psychological function of the pain is to distract you from things you don't want to think about or feel, most often anger. And in my situation, it was my anger, my rage at this illness that was affecting my ten year old daughter, who just diagnosed with diabetes now is very upset about that. But I think it wasn't quite acknowledging how upsetting it was.

My relationship to pain:

jeff's take on pain: It's interesting that the parts of the brain that light up with chronic pain. If you're looking at a functional MRI scan are the same parts of the brain that light up for emotional pain. So if you have a loss or something like that, if you're grieving or it's the same part of the brain that lights up as when you have chronic pain. So there's a close connection between emotional pain and chronic pain. So we don't know what is the cause and what is the effect. They are intertwined the emotional pain and the chronic pain.

My best advice to fellow sufferers of chronic conditions:

Sometimes we have trauma in our past that we prefer not to think about. And the pain is a very convenient way to not have to think about our traumatic histories or people we're angry at or people we have conflict about.

resume normal activities as soon as you can

I like what Sano says. resume normal activities as soon as you can. That doesn't mean do it when you're in your worst pain. I think the idea is when you're finding. So, for instance, I actually have a patient now who is a runner, and I've been sort of encouraging him to run, but he has some chronic pain issue in his back and his leg. But I don't encourage him to run when his pain is at its worst. I encourage him to run when he noticed, like if he wakes up in the morning and he says, oh, my pain is not so bad this morning. That's a time to get out and run. That's a time to resume normal activities, because I think what he will then find is that if he runs that that is going to not make it worse and he's going to find it actually makes it better. And that will start to provide evidence for him that it's not a physically caused problem. If he tries to run when it's at its worst, then that may end up just being more torture for him.

ask quality questions
often I will say to people, if we weren't talking about this pain, what would we be talking about if we were to put this aside? What are the emotional issues? What's going on in your life? What are the memories that this is a distraction from? And once we start to talk about that, often the symptoms just go away because you don't need them anymore. So this is a very good question.
This will expose the unconscious of the subconscious thinking and emotions. Yeah. Or I put it a little differen: It allows it to percolate up. It creates a space for things, memories, thoughts, feelings to come up.

often I will say to people, if we weren't talking about this pain, what would we be talking about if we were to put this aside? What are the emotional issues? What's going on in your life? What are the memories that this is a distraction from?

Dr. Jeff Axelbank

Healed with body mind therapy

Healed with Dr sarno's method