How does reading Sarno heal back pain? A qualitative study
TL;DR if your pain has significantly changed after reading one of Dr John Sarno’s books, I would love to interview you.
Let's say you have an illness no one seems to fully understand. The surgeon proclaims that cutting you open will help, but with significant risk of complications. The pharmacist shrugs and hands you depressants to take your mind off the discomfort — but she doesn't even pretend that the drugs can resolve the pain.
Saddened, you find yourself at a bus stop one day recounting your woes to a friendly stranger. He nods with sympathy, and then gives you a closer glance.
He looks around before leaning in, voice barely above a whisper.
Can I tell you something strange that might help?
Of course, you nod.
To be completely honest, there’s this method I know that can cure you. No surgery, no drugs, and it can be mostly done in a single afternoon.
Your eyebrows raise. And what is the price of this method? You ask.
If you don’t mind waiting a bit, it can be free. Otherwise, it costs less than the price of a restaurant meal.
Would you believe this stranger?
What if he showed you dozens of people who swear that it worked for them?
Scroll down the reviews for John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, and you’ll find about 2 in 5 claiming that the book greatly reduced or eliminated their pain. If you total the number of reviews for his books across Goodreads and Amazon, and use some publishing heuristics, the number of book cures is likely between 100k and 1 million1.
Having personally experienced a major reduction in my pain after reading the book, I am very familiar with the mechanism that Sarno proposes.
Yet there’s still something fascinating here that I believe no one is paying attention to.
How does reading a book fundamentally change your bodily experience?
When it works for people, how does it work?
That’s why I’m running a qualitative study to look more closely at what’s going on.
If you or someone you know has had this experience, please reach out to maxkshen@gmail.com
Thank you to Sebastien Ehmann and Zoran Josipovic for support
Publisher bounds suggest anywhere between 1 review per 60 purchases to 1 in 400. Let’s say roughly 1 in 300 (likely an overestimate since the book was published three decades ago).
First, just from the Amazon reviews (10k)
10k reviews suggests around 3 million copies sold.
If 2/5 of the reviewers experienced a dramatic shift in their pain, we can maybe halve that for the general population, and halve it again for the people who bought but didn’t read the book. That leaves 1/10, or about 300K people who experienced a dramatic shift in their back pain.
I recently had that experience. Happy to chat about it.