David Shechter MD
as a young medical student DR david shechter suffered for months of a chronic knee pain. He was lucky to meet Dr John sarno who told him his issue was related to tension in his life. Because he was open to this idea - he healed within a short time and his knee went back to normal. here he tells his healing story.
I was a young medical student at New York University, and I enjoyed playing basketball and running, and they were specifically pleasures and also releases from the stress and tension of medical school. I began to have knee pain that got severe enough that I could not run and I could not play basketball. it worried me a great deal. I did not know why I had this pain.
Knee pain that lasted for many months but I also began to worry more and more about it and got into that terrible cycle of am I ever going to get better? How am I going to get back to the sports I enjoy? How am I going to be active? I'm so young. It shouldn't happen to me. I began to read in the library what could be wrong with my legs or my knees or my feet? Something had to be fixable.
Doctors gave me an examination and then some medication. But I did not get better. And I went back to the student health doctor, and I asked him for referral to a specialist, and he sent me to an orthopedic surgeon who was very prestigious in New York City. They would see the students as a courtesy, and he recommended some testing and imaging, and nothing really showed up to explain my condition.
In the course of this, I decided to walk into the office of a doctor who had lectured to us during the anatomy class. He was a physical medicine rehabilitation doctor named John Sarno. He was not yet known as an author or a physician who treated chronic pain with a different type of approach. But I walked into his office expecting maybe some special physical therapy or some other approach that would cure my problem.. I briefly introduced myself and explained the problem, and he looked at me and he said, I don't know how you'll take this, but 95% of this chronic pain is psychosomatic, and it was a shock.
It was like getting hit with a blast wave of cold air
It was like getting hit with a blast wave of cold air because it was not what I was expecting to hear from him. he said, I can see you're a little bit skeptical. Why don't you come to my lecture that I do for patients on this subject next week? And if it makes sense to you, then I'm happy to see you as a patient at no cost the following week, and we'll figure something out. So I figured, what do I have to lose to go to his lecture? And I do remember that I had stress in high school and I had some stomach symptoms and I had stress in College and I had a little bit of back pain. And maybe I thought about this a little bit and said, Well, maybe it's worth doing this thing. So I go to his lecture and there's maybe 20 people, 30 people in the room, most of them very well dressed New Yorkers in their 30s, 40s and 50s. I was 21 at the time, and he presents his scheme of how emotions stress, the mind, the personality, the unconscious can cause you to be in a loop, get stuck in a loop of pain. that's how you can get out of that loop is the same way understanding the emotions, the feelings, the knowledge. And by the end of that evening, I thanked him for the lecture, and I said, I'll be back next week, and I'd like to love for you to examine me in the office as well. I went home and I felt like a weight was lifting off of my shoulders.
It was an explanation that made sense to me
It was like the stress and the worry. And somebody had hope for me. It was an explanation that made sense to me. the next few weeks I was jogging. Then I was shooting basketballs, and then I was playing basketball. So it was really a rapid recovery. Once I understood that it could be real pain, but it didn't have to be due to damage.
Be open and have hope. If you get stuck in a chronic condition when you feel like there's no way out and you feel like nobody has an answermaybe the mind is the way out. Look at mind as part of your body you can harness to heal or feel better.
ask yourself: what would I do if my pain or suffering went away tomorrow? What would I do with my life? what stops me from doing that now, even though my pain or suffering has not gone away. a lot of times people will say: I'll do this once the pain goes away. Well, actually, the way to make the pain go away is start taking the steps in the direction of doing what you really want to do with your life now. even before your problem has gone away.
How Healing Works: Get Well and Stay Well Using Your Hidden Power to Heal. I recommend this book to my students as well.