Do you suffer from ongoing pain or other chronic medical symptoms such as fatigue, lower back pain, arthritis, acid indigestion, insomnia, or migraines? Do they interfere with your family time or your work? Have you been forced to give up activities that you enjoy? Do you feel as though your symptoms are taking over your life?
Thirty percent of the population suffer from chronic debilitating illnesses and pain that respond only partially to conventional medicine. But this doesn't mean that there is no relief in sight.
Dr. Arthur Barsky, psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine, has found that changing the way you think about your illness can have a remarkable effect on how you experience your symptoms. Two people with the same symptoms can live dramatically different lives because they think about and react to their symptoms differently.
At Harvard Medical School, Dr. Barsky developed "Stop Being Your Symptoms and Start Being Yourself," a breakthrough six-week program designed to overcome the symptoms of chronic illnesses of every kind. Based on more than twenty years of firsthand clinical experience, his scientifically tested treatment plan is unique, powerful, and simple to learn. This groundbreaking program teaches patients to master the five psychological factors that make chronic symptoms persist through hundreds of exercises, worksheets, and patient examples.
You may not be able to completely eliminate your medical symptoms. But it is possible to control your symptoms rather than letting them control you—to manage your pain, fatigue, insomnia, and anxiety. You can minimize your symptoms, learn new coping skills, and do more to make sure that your symptoms are not robbing your life of meaning and pleasure.
Stop being your symptoms—and start living the life you deserve.
Before we outline the six-week program to stop being your symptoms and start being yourself, it is important for you to see the bigger picture -- that you are not alone in living with symptoms that resist medical treatment, continue to distress you, and erode the quality of your life. Many Americans face the very same problem, and the suffering these symptoms cause seems to have been worsening over the last few decades. In this chapter we will examine how social, historical, and psychological forces can make your bodily symptoms more troublesome. Armed with this knowledge, you will then be in the best position to take advantage of the six-week program that follows. You can take control of your health, rather than being a prisoner of symptoms.
Doing Better and Feeling Worse1
Doing Better
Modern medicine has astounding powers to detect and cure disease, powers hardly imaginable just a few years ago. We have techniques to open clogged arteries and reverse heart attacks. We can reattach severed limbs and surgically correct fetal heart malformations while the fetus is still in the womb. We have created artificial skin and hearts, kidneys and cartilage. Tiny cameras can be swallowed to photograph the inside of the stomach and intestines. Special viruses have been modified so that they can insert new DNA to replace the faulty genes that are responsible for some inherited diseases.
As a result of all this progress over the last fifty years, the death rates from most major killers, including heart disease, stroke, and several forms of cancer, have declined dramatically. Deaths from heart disease have fallen by 40 percent since 1970. Breast cancer mortality is 20 percent lower than it was in 1990. AIDS is no longer the imminent death sentence that it once was, and patients routinely live comfortably for more than a decade following the diagnosis. According to all the major indices of collective health, we are indeed an extraordinarily healthy society. Life expectancy is at an all-time high, and the gaps between men and women and between whites and blacks are narrowing. The average American lived 47.3 years in 1900, 68.2 years in 1950, and an astonishing 76.9 years in 2000.
These exciting triumphs over lethal diseases, however, have had a perverse effect: they make our everyday ailments seem worse.2 Medicine's new therapeutic powers have actually made it harder to live with the less severe, chronic illnesses that continue to defy medical science. We can save premature babies who are born no bigger than the size of your hand, but we still can't prevent children from getting recurrent ear infections. We can characterize the microscopic, cellular changes that come with aging, but we can't prevent the dry skin and the insomnia that accompany it.
Our astonishing medical advances serve to underscore our more limited progress against chronic illnesses, degenerative disease, aging, and the wear and tear of daily life. Do you suffer from migraines? Lower back pain? Ever miss a day of work due to premenstrual pain or allergies or heartburn? Despite medicine's conquest of many diseases, you know from personal experience that plenty of illnesses remain to afflict us. We need only think of ourselves or our families, our neighbors or our coworkers, to realize how prevalent are fatigue, asthma, osteoarthritis, constipation, memory problems, and the like. These are all conditions that are indisputably real, but can prove very resistant to medical treatment.
Despite the best medical care, these symptoms continue or recur, and can come to play too prominent a role in our lives.
Arthur J. Barsky, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of psychiatric research at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
He is the author of Worried Sick and is a widely recognized authority in his field.
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