A Doctor's Advice Aged Me Overnight

I just ordered a book called Blind Spots. Although I haven’t started it yet, I have a good understanding of what it’s about from watching a few minutes of CSpan’s  Book TV, on which its author appeared. (If you’ve never watched Book TV, you should give it a try.). 

The author, Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, has a wonderful point: we get locked into theories that are considered truth because they have been around for a while, although more recent science may have shown they may not actually be true. Dr. Makary says it takes medical practice about twenty years to adopt new discoveries as national practice. Medical practice is often far behind new science.

I know this to be true, at least in the instance of heart disease. When my mother went to the Pritikin Longevity Center in the 80s, an outcast, Nathan Pritikin, was already preaching that if we ate less meat and more plants, we could reverse Type2 diabetes and heart disease. He had evidence, too.

 I’ve  followed the entire journey of heart disease from that outcast to the present. In between, we went down several blind alleys about cholesterol, keto diets, and statins. But there has also been Dean Ornish, who is mostly on Dr. Pritikin’s page. We now know that the cholesterol we eat is not related to the cholesterol we make. We have made great strides in treating heart disease. But it took us 50 years.

 Every once in a while, we should go back to first principles and rethink many of the things we believe to see if they really have been proven true or disproven by subsequent science and life experience.

I will use myself as an example here since I have my own medical information.

I would hardly refer to myself as an athlete. However, looking back over my life, I can see that a substantial percentage of it has been spent learning and playing games, sports and other disciplines that involved moving the body.

Problem is, as you get older that moving thing becomes more and more laborious. Back in the day, I could tell my body to do something, and my body would just do it without much connection to my mind. Those were glorious days in which I played tennis, ran marathons, had babies, swam laps and started businesses almost simultaneously. They went by a blur, my 30s, 40s and 50s. Looking back on them, I don’t remember thinking very much at all.

In fact, I never thought about anything very much until I was about 55 and my back went out for the first time. 

My husband, who had been a radiologist, had died the previous year. Sometime in the year before he died, he x-rayed my chest for some totally unrelated reason and told me I had the worst degenerative disc disease he had ever seen.

 I said, skeptically to him, “but I have no pain“ and he replied ominously,” you will.”

Time passed, as it is wont to do. One day I couldn’t get out of bed. That day was a life changer.

In one fell swoop, my youth was gone. From then on, I had to think about everything I did with my body in terms of whether it was going to hurt or help my back. I became a back patient.

In retrospect, I should never have gone to the doctor.  However at the time I didn’t know about the connection of mind and body, so I went to the best doctor I could find. He was at Barrow Neurological Institute,  which was, and probably still is, the best place  for back issues. At that time, I was offered a surgery so frightening that I never even contemplated doing it.

I had seen  a surgeon with a blind spot. His blind spot was the mind/body connection to pain. Dr.John Sarno, another outcast, had begun to talk about the relation of back pain to trauma, but most people thought he was a wacko. Volker Sonntag, the surgeon, never  considered that.

I did stop running, and my entire relationship toward my body changed. I became wildly interested in yoga and for the next 25 or 30 years, I devoted my exercise days to yoga, quitting running much the same way that 20 years before I had quit tennis for running.

In all this time, what I have learned is that the mind and body are inextricably connected, and if no one had fed me a line of con about my back I probably could’ve kept on running for many more years. I stopped on the advice of something outside my own body, a doctor who when you come down to it knew way less about my body than I knew about it, and had a blind spot about conservative treatment. He sold surgery!

I will never know whether I could’ve run another marathon, but I do know that exploring the mind-body connection has taught me a great deal about the nature of as it sweeps pain and the nature of fear and the nature of nature. The next time my back spoke to me, which was a couple of years ago, I brought myself back to being able to walk by journaling and meditating and remembering that the body and mind are connected, and that pain comes, not from the back, but from the brain. This rather more modern theory of pain will probably become standard medical practice -- in about twenty years.