Joanne Lee SmithChronic pain and symptoms recovery Nurse / Coach

Stop Physical Treatments, Think Psychological for Pain Relief

10 Feb 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:35

In this YouTube monologue, Joanne Smith recounts her personal experiment with Dr. John Sarno’s psychosomatic approach to chronic pain. She interprets Sarno’s advice to “think psychological, repudiate the physical” literally, halting all conventional physical interventions—including heat, cold, stretching, core work, steroid injections, and radiofrequency or nerve ablation procedures. To replace these treatments, she adopts a psychological strategy centered on expressive writing, specifically channeling what she perceives as repressed rage onto paper for a week. Joanne reports that this focused emotional release led to a marked reduction in her pain symptoms, suggesting that the psychological work alone was sufficient to alleviate her condition.

Chapters

So, from what I hear and from my own personal experience, what was helpful to me, it was like an initial dump of getting all that stuff out that I'd not really ever given attention to. I'd never really felt, I'd never really thought. And because in the book it said, think psychological, repudiate— I do my American accent, you can take the mickey out of me, all my American friends— but repudiate The physical. That's what Dr. Sarno said. Stop all physical treatments, which is what I did. I took it literally. Stop all physical treatments. Think psychological. So I was like, right, I'm all in. I literally stopped putting heat on, stopped putting cold on, stopped doing stretches, stopped doing special core, whatever. I just stopped all of that stuff that was classed as fixing. Um, and I made a decision. No more steroid injections, no more painful radiofrequency treatment, nerve ablations, no more. Think psychological. And all I had, all I understood from it was, how do I think psychological? Well, I just write about my anger, write about my rage, because in the beginning all I understood what it was, this potential of repressed rage. So I let that rage out for a week No one needed to see it, no one could read it, no one heard it, it was just pen to paper focusing on that and I saw amazing reduction in symptoms.