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Back Sense:
A Revolutionary Approach to Halting the Cycle of Chronic Back Pain
By Ronald D. Siegel, Michael H. Urdang, and Douglas R. Johnson
Broadway Books, 2002

• To order a copy please visit: Amazon.com.

Book Description
For five million Americans at any given time, chronic back pain is a nightmarish disability that interferes with every aspect of their lives. While it has usually been attributed to damaged disks or other structures of the spine, new evidence points to a cycle of psychological stress, muscle tension, and fear-based avoidance of activity as the true cause for the vast majority of sufferers.

Back Sense presents a step-by-step self-treatment program for chronic back pain which integrates recent advances in medical and psychological research with mindfulness practice. The program draws upon cognitive, psychodynamic, and behavioral techniques along with mindfulness-based exercises to help patients interrupt the cycles that maintain the condition.

Ronald Siegel, PsyD is a clinical psychologist on the faculty of IMP and Harvard Medical School who has practiced vipassana meditation for many years. He developed the Back Sense program together with his medical colleagues after recovering from his own disabling chronic back pain.

Reviews

"I highly recommend this wonderful book to everyone with back pain. The first of my patients who read it got out of bed and off narcotics for the first time in months. We’re both thrilled."
-- Christiane Northrup, MD
    Author, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom (Bantam, 1998)
    The Wisdom of Monopause (Bantam, 2001)

"Back Sense is a well-researched, well-written, and approachable book on a subject that occupies enormous amounts of time, effort, and money in the health care system: chronic back pain. The book explains important new discoveries in the physiologic and psychologic aspects of back pain, and is particularly lucid and eloquent in explaining mind-body relationships as they pertain to this area of clinical practice. The book outlines treatment regimens that can return large numbers of people to happier, more productive, and more satisfying lives. I can testify to its efficacy, both as a patient and a practitioner: this approach works. Every practitioner who sees patients with chronic back pain should have this in their library."
-- David K. Urion, MD
    Associate Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School

"At last! Back Sense is the first book, available to the public, that a person with chronic back pain could pick up and use to cure themselves. Back Sense gives a logical, reasonable and alternative view of how back pain problems develop, what maintains them, and how an individual can break the fear/anxiety cycle that creates so much suffering.

Back Sense brings radical new developments in back pain treatment to a general audience in a user-friendly format. It integrates the newest finding in the medical literature with up to date psychological treatment methods. This book will help people to discover for themselves the way to break the cycle of chronic back pain."
-- Deborah M. Hulihan, PsyD
    Clinical Faculty, Harvard Medical School
    Former director, Behavioral Medicine Program,
    Cambridge Health Alliance

“Their program involves a system that helps sufferers change their beliefs about the causes and consequences of pain, and eventually enables them to ‘reclaim lost activities’ through flexibility, strength, and endurance training and reconditioning mental exercise. The advice they offer is solid, and not generally given because too often efforts are focused on simply alleviating the pain.”
--The New York Times

For more detailed information, including downloadable treatment forms and exercises, please visit www.BackSense.org