”Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller
dr David clack talks explains what is exactly body-mind therapy
body mind therapy works. i know it from my clients. I'm a gastroenterologist, and I first learned about the ability of the mind to create physical symptoms in the body in 1983 with a patient who was severely ill, had been for two years, had completely baffled two different universities, and I stumbled on the fact that she was dealing with a severe stress in her life, and it dated back to when she was a child, and I didn't know what to do with that information.
body mind therapy works
My medical training didn't really address that issue, but I knew of a psychiatrist at UCLA where I was in training at that time who had a practice in this area, and I got the patient to see her. And her name was Harriet Kaplan, and she was able to cure the patient with less than three months of weekly counseling sessions. And I just thought that was remarkable. I had nothing in my medical training, and I was in the 8th year of my medical training at that point, and no one had ever said you could alleviate a serious physical symptom just by talking to somebody.
the connection between pain and emotional distress
And the most recent study that used this fMRI technique was from Boulder, Colorado, just published at the end of September in the Journal JAMA Psychiatry, Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry. what they found was that with psychotherapy, the brains actually physically changed. They tested what the brain was doing when it was experiencing pain before they did psychotherapy on these patients. Then they did eight sessions of psychotherapy that were intended to alleviate their pain. And it did. The patient's level of pain dropped dramatically, and then they redid the functional magnetic resonance imaging study on their brains. After this, psychotherapy and Lo and behold, the anatomy had changed. There were physical changes in the brain just as a result of talking to the psychotherapist, and I have to emphasize these are new, innovative psychotherapy techniques. These are not the usual more widespread techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy, which have been shown over and over again to have minimal effectiveness. You have to have psychotherapy that is intended to alleviate symptoms, not just to help people cope with it.
under body mind therapy There are SEVERAL innovative psychotherapies that have been developed that have a curative intent that intend to alleviate these psychophysiologic symptoms, and that address emotions to one degree or another.
PRT OR pain reprocessing therapy
the one that was used in the Boulder study is called pain reprocessing therapy, and that one focuses initially on the neuroscience, assuring people that their symptoms are generated by the brain and that there is no danger to their body, there's no damage to their body, and that therefore they need to start thinking psychologically about this. But to begin with to lower the sense of fear and danger and replace that with a sense of safety, that the symptom is not an indication, whether it's chronic pain or something else is not an indication of damage in the body and then going from there, well, if it's not damage in the body, what is it? It's a psychological issue. And let's try to figure out what that might be. But by lowering the fear, there's this cycle that people get into. They have this pain, they become fearful that that means there's damage to their body. They alter their physical movements and the fear causes more pain. The pain causes more fear.
emotional awareness and expression therapy
The second major new innovative psychotherapy is called emotional awareness and expression therapy. it goes to the next level of treatment and look to find the negative emotions. Anger, fear, shame, grief, guilt. Try to find those emotions in my patients and help them to become aware of those emotions, try to understand where those emotions come from and help the patient become aware of them.
