Back Pain Permanent Healing: Understanding the Myths, Lies, and Confusion About Pain with Steve Ozanich and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Bonus Episode

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish and this is the I love marketing podcast.

In this episode you'll discover how to be a better entrepreneur with better health. You'll learn how to live the healthy, happy life you deserve. The root cause of pain, how pain can be associated to personality, tms and more with Steve Ozanich. Steve Ozanich is a mind body health consultant, health coach and author of the great pain deception, Dr. John Sarno's top 10 healing discoveries in Back Pain, Permanent Healing, Understanding the Myth Lies in confusion and is committed to reducing suffering around health. If you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com HealthyYLife that's ilovemarketing.com HealthyLife hello, this.

Is Joe Polish and I have got a friend of mine by the name of Steve Ozanich on the line with me today and we're going to do an interview that's not necessarily about business or marketing, although I think it has everything to do with your ability to be good and effective not only in your business, your career, but your life. Because your ability to function without pain has everything to do with your performance and your effectiveness. So his name is Steve Ozanich and Steve is in Ohio right now on a phone. And I'm on a phone here in my headquarters in Arizona. And can you hear me okay, Steve?

I can, Joe.

Wonderful. Well, here we are finally doing it. Let me give everyone a little bit of background on you. This is the only thing that I'll be reading unless I decide to read from your book throughout this interview. So Steve Ozanich is a Mind body health consultant, health coach and author. He pens an amazing book called the Great pain deception and Dr. John Sarno's top 10 healing discoveries based on his own experience, the work of John Sarno, MD and 10 years of intensive research. His new book, Back Pain Permanent Understanding the Myth, Lies and Confusion is a three year writing effort to pull the larger picture of suffering together and to erase the confusion on healing. Over the past 16 years, Ozanich has helped to teach thousands of people how to heal themselves through his lectures, books, articles and interviews. Steve is also the author of two children's books. He's earned three degrees from Youngstown State University, aas bsas and an MBA with four consecutive Distinguished Student Awards from the Williamson School. In addition to being a Mind body health consultant and life coach, the Ohio Base, Ozanich is a health blogger with Jennings Wire, a health lecturer, certified personal fitness trainer Acoustic guitar player and a golf swing coach. So Steve, let's get into it. I mean, you are a guy that just really understands a tremendous amount about the cause of not only back pain, but all kinds of different pains in the body. What you're going to share, what we're going to talk about today, for people that have never read a book on it, don't really quite understand, it could be one of the greatest ahas and discoveries of their life. I think many people may be initially resistant to what we're going to talk about because it is completely contrarian about what is the root cause and the solution to much of not only their physical pain, but many ailments that show up. And with my work with so many high level drugs driven entrepreneurs and people with addictions, including my own, this is such an important subject. And there are so many, like you say in your new book, which is called Back Pain Permanent Understanding, the myth lies in confusion. I mean, I think those three words, myth, lies and confusion, is pretty much what drives most of the pain management industry. And you say the solution to back pain was discovered in the 1970s by this amazing doctor by the name of Dr. John Sarno. And so let's get into it. I mean, what didn't I say about you that people need to know before we jump into it? And maybe that will just lead into, you know, what is your story and why do you write books on this subject? And we'll just go into that.

I guess I could preface all that by saying I did not believe what we're about to talk about either. And I think I remember you saying at one point, 15 years ago, you got the book and kind of pushed it aside. Oh, yeah, Yeah.

I read Dr. John Sarno's work years ago. I mean, I've heard, I watched the ABC's 2020 segment that John Stossel did many years ago, which people can watch on YouTube. Howard Stern would always talk about Dr. John Sarno. Howard Stern had back pain for many, many years of his life. Used to lay on his studio before he would do his radio show because he had such excruciating pain. And I think went to, I mean, you would know better than I because you're friends with Sarno. He basically went to one or two of John Sarno's lectures and swear it solved cured his back pain. And if you hear the interview with, and I'm saying this to the listeners, you already know all. If you want to hear an interview with Dr. John Sarno, which much of your work is Based on Howard Stern is the nicest to John Sarno, as to any probably human being you've ever heard, because he swears that he saved his life. So, yeah, I studied this 15 years ago, but I didn't believe it because I had too many doctors, too many chiropractors, too many friends that would say, no, no, back pain is structural. It's not stemming from your thought process or whatever. So, sorry, that was an interruption. But I figured I would say, I.

Mean, that's a good interruption, because that's the heart structural part of it. And what really takes me into my story, right, I was in pain, back pain, maddening pain, for just under 30 years. I had tried everything, you know, from hanging upside down to acupuncture to chiropractic adjustments, physical therapy. You, name was waxing and waning, and it would get worse, you know, a little bit better. But I was told I had severe herniated discs, that I had narrowing in there. I had degenerative disc disease, that I had osteophytes, which are like little calcium deposits, that I had a weak core, which is really weird because I was a bodybuilder. You know, I'm squatting 425, I'm benching 320, and they're telling me, your core is too weak. So I should have known right there. But I tried everything. I had everything. And in the late 1990s, I got very severe. I lost 54 pounds from the weight, and I was crawling around on the floor. I could no longer function. And so I was really close to surgery when a friend of mine said, hey, you sound like this doctor's article, Dr. John Sarno. And so I read it, and I didn't believe it. You know, he said, it is not coming from the structure of the spine. No matter what the MRI or the X ray says about osteoarthritis or anything else, it's coming from the autonomic nervous system. The brain is reducing blood flow in the spine, in the muscles and nerves, to create a severe debilitating pain. For one reason, to distract you, because you are in a state right now that you're overwhelmed. The demands that you've placed on yourself have become too much, simply too much. And so what happens is the brain, in order to help you cope, obsesses on the body. It rivets on the body, and so it creates it. And so from that point, I got worse and worse and worse until I got so bad that I actually opened this book up again, began to read it with an open mind this time. And I am now 16 years pain free. I'm older, but I feel better than I have in my whole life.

I want to preface this of what we're going to talk about because when I describe TMS to people, which I'll ask you in a minute, what is tms? And I know it could take a long time to cover that subject, but I want to kind of give people an understanding. I always, you know, when I start describing it to people, I always preface it as saying, if I would have heard what I'm about to share with you without having read any of Dr. John Sarno's book or not having read your book the Great Pain Deception. And when I first found you, I literally reached out to you and said, can I pay you to do a Skype call? And I was in excruciating pain. And this was a couple years ago. And basically, I mean, the pain had gone from my knee because, you know, an MRI and an ultrasound had shown a torn meniscus in my right knee. And I was going to the top doctors in Phoenix and they were all saying, you need to have surgery. And I was talking to people that had surgery and they said, sometimes it turns out bad, sometimes it doesn't. I didn't want to get cut into unless I absolutely had to. And I found, I started listening to Sarno's work again, which then made me go online and do a search and find that you are the current premier guy that's out there writing books and teaching people about tms. And I did a Skype call with you. And within two weeks after doing my Skype call with you, because I know you charged to now have people do sessions with you, the pain was 95% gone and never came back. I have little tinges here and there, but now I know where it comes from. But anyway, I will tell people that what I'm about to describe to you, if you don't read the books, I don't think there's any way that I can convey to you at the depth that is needed for your brain to even accept that. And so I want to say that up front that there are real injuries, there are real structural things, and those do need to be ruled out. What we are sharing with you is for information purposes only. We're not dispensing, we're not your doctors, that sort of thing. So I want to kind of give that disclaimer that is always said and at the same time, my experience, myself, and certainly the experiences hundreds of Thousands, if not maybe millions of people that Sarno has reached over the years absolutely is valid. And it, and I believe it is the solution to pain. And everyone that I have recommended your books to or speaking with you, that has hired you for like a Skype call, and you're not an expensive guy. I mean, this is, you know, most people spend not only tons of many years of their life in misery, but many thousands of dollars on treatments that flat out don't work. And, you know, you've got no treatment modality, nothing like that. You basically just make people aware of what is the root cause of the pain. So instead of pain management, it actually pain solving, it's like, let's eliminate it and all that sort of stuff. I am a byproduct of this. And the pain had to get so severe for me to where I finally opened up my mind and really accepted it, which in the past I had not. And so what I want to do is what sort of disclaimer do people need to know before we go into this? Because then let's really talk about what is causing pain most of the time. I would even put it up there as 99 of people's back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, and fibromyalgia and a whole variety of other things can be caused by tms.

Right. I guess the only disclaimer is, you know, I'm not a medical doctor and I'm not a psychotherapist. Dr. Sarno calls me an educator, and that's what I do. I teach people about what's going on. And he called it knowledge therapy. It was a phrase that he coined. The knowledge of what was going on began to heal the people, and it absolutely blew his mind away. And of course we can get into that. But there's something else we should say. This is not alternative medicine or New Agey thing. This is medicine with psychology and medicine. Real medical doctors do this with people. So from that point, I guess we can explain what it is. Yep.

What is tms? And, well, you know, who is Sarno, by the way? Let's get, let's give a little background on Sarno because I consider him from, you know, and again, I'm not a doctor and, you know, I'm a business guy. I'm an entrepreneur. I believe he's probably one of if the not the most knowledgeable, you know, back pain doctor probably in existence. And in spite of his having helped so many people, the medical machinery that has been propped up to, you know, make a ton of money off people's pain and keep it in existence and prolong it. I mean, he literally helps so many people. But in spite of that, the medical machine is so huge that people that have never heard about him, including many doctors, have no clue just how important this is. So I just give some background on Sarno, then let's explain what TMS actually is.

Right. Well, his discovery of TMS is worthy of a Nobel Prize in medicine. I mean, he literally changed the world. And like I said in my second book, the world doesn't know it yet because the medical machinery is powerful. He doesn't really believe that they'll ever accept it at some point. But you know, even where he worked at NYU, he was there for 50 years. You could imagine. Maybe it takes five decades of someone's life to finally pull the big picture together. Maybe people can't do it in a short time, but he saw so many tens of thousands of people would fly in from around the world to meet him. And virtually every single time it worked. The people would heal if they could accept the fact that there was nothing physically wrong with their body. And so I guess leading into TMS then that he discovered early on that what he was doing wasn't working with his back pain patients. He said his results were as bad as every other doctor's. Sometimes this works, sometimes that worked. And so he began to talk to these people and he looked at their charts and he said, hey, these people have other things going on, other health things going on. The back pain patients had allergies, anxiety, dizziness, skin problems, frequent urination, you name it, down, down the path. And then he began to talk to them. Imagine that. That doesn't happen much these days. You know, I have people complaining all the time to me and my doctor doesn't even look at me. He walks into the office, he looks at the chart, writes a prescription and walks right out. But Dr. Sarno was old school. You know, he's 93 years old now, still alive, still seems to be doing well. But in these conversations with them, he found out that these people had a special type of personality. They were self driven people. They wanted to win, they needed to succeed. They tried to keep everybody happy. They tried to keep all the balls in the air. And this demand to be a good person, to be perfectionistic in everything that you do, is deeply enraging to the unconscious. But the problem is, is that people don't even know it because it's unconscious. You never feel it. You're not aware of these thoughts, feelings and emotions that are going on because we're so focused on making everything right and never failing in life. And so, you know, a lot of the times they were warriors, some of the times they had traumatic childhoods. I would say most of them that I've talked to in the last 16 years have had some type of trauma there stuck in them. Some of them had actually good childhoods, but they still harbored all these same problems. You know, perfectionism, make everybody like me all the time, Work, work, work, pushing themselves, you know, to win and to succeed. And so he discovered early on that this thing was bigger than anyone had seen. And as he began to explain to them, you know, this is your brain using the disc in your back, using your KN meniscus tear, using the rotator cuff, the hands, the feet, whatever it was. And some of them, not all of them, but some of them began to heal. And so he started looking into it deeper. And he said, ah, you know, I can see what's going on here. I can see what's going on. The brain is doing you a favor. It's protecting you. And of course, he talked about the now infamous Helen, very famous woman. She's now all around the world in every book. She had severe back pain so bad that I think she was bedridden for a couple years. Her family heard about him, took her to New York to see him, and they discovered she was. Had been molested by her father when she was a little girl. And so he sent her to a group, a support group, and her pain got worse and worse and worse. And she said, Dr. Sarno, I believe you. I believe there's nothing wrong with my back, but I'm getting worse. And her husband said, you're talking about 40 years of repression here. And she lost it. She started crying, she broke down. She thought she was going to die. Her heart was racing, and within minutes her back pain disappeared. And so he said, ah, it's a protective mechanism. When we're overwhelmed with thoughts that we don't want to have and we're pushing ourselves too hard, the brain will come along and help us simply by causing an ulcer or migraine, of course, is the paragon of tms, right? And so TMS itself stands for Tension Myoneural Syndrome. The word tension has always been in there. But early on he thought it was only muscle, so he called it myositis. But as he got into it deeper, he realized, ah, this is involving nerves, too, and tendons. And so it's that phrase TMS switched to tension myoneural Syndrome. And Then by the end of his career, and he noted that, hey, this is even affecting the immune system and the derma and everything else. So we began calling it the mind body syndrome for tms. And so it's evolved as he's learned more and he's trained. Handful of doctors around the country and their success rates absolutely soared in every field from general practitioners to rheumatologists to hypertension doctors. The mind affects the body more than we think. Our thoughts can heal us or kill us. It's that powerful. And of course, you know, we can get into the problems with it. You know, who has it? Everybody. Everybody in the world has some form of it. You know, whether it's a skin problem or restlessness or sleeplessness or upset stomach, heartburn, it's some level, they've got it. Whether it's just minor or crippling, it is huge.

And the interesting thing about it, for as many different people that I've interviewed, I've interviewed over 500 experts and some mostly world famous entrepreneurs on business and marketing and messaging, a lot of people on health. And I've heard all kinds of different reasons for the cause of pain. For instance, many doctors say it's food allergies. If you're gluten intolerant or dairy intolerant or you remove grains from your diet, a lot of people's pain will go away. There's all kinds of different things that I've been exposed to about the cause of pain from people that I have come across that one of our friends, Jane Barlow, who didn't run for 20 years because doctors had told her she can't run, and I gave her your book, she read your book and, and literally shortly thereafter, she's running for the very first time and her pain had gone away. And numerous people, I have another person I referred, I won't say their name. This guy's wife, who'd been in pain for I think a couple decades and had heard me kind of talk about you at my genius network meetings and reached out to me and I put you in touch with him and then his wife. And he sends me an email shortly thereafter saying, thank you so much. I mean, this is like it's a miracle. Her pain is almost gone. And, you know, so people, it puts a lot of people on the path. And the thing I want to accomplish with our conversation today is put people on this path and let you know that in the scope of doing this interview is to introduce you to this concept, introduce you to this solution and have you explore It I'll just ask you some questions and we'll cover what I think we need to cover. Because I am a person that very much doubted this. And I went to so many doctors because in my position, I meet some of the best quote, unquote experts in the world. And many of them are brilliant. And I learn a lot of stuff from, and I call them experts because, I mean, they have a real depth of knowledge. And what I've also learned is there are many experts out there that really have a depth of knowledge on the wrong thing. And, you know, I put out like an interview like this for free. And one of the challenges like with this is, you know, if people don't pay, they don't pay attention. And, and sometimes the most expensive information in the world is bad information. And a lot of information that's bad information is free. But on the flip side of a lot of what people think is the very best doctors, the very best advice, the very best ways to go about solving something, although it is credentialized, although there's degrees behind it, although there's a lot of muscle behind it, it is absolutely wrong. And it is putting people down the path of the worst places they could ever go. And in the area of treating pain, I believe the vast majority of everything that is out there from the treatments is not only wrong, it is dangerously wrong. And no one really even addresses it. I mean, every time I've gone to a doctor or a chiropractor, and I have many that I love that are great people that do a lot of good things, there's many that have good intentions and they're caring people. And rarely do they ask you, look, oh, my back hurts, oh, my knee hurts, or my shoulder hurts. And they don't say, well, do an mri, let's do a scan, let's do an X ray, let's figure it out. And then they give a structural diagnosis and they start treating the spine, they start treating the pain instead of asking what's going on in your life, what could be causing this? And it's mind boggling. And then you bring up what we're talking about here and they not only don't accept it, they think you're an asshole, they think you're somehow opposed to. And had I not gone through it myself and had I not seen it with so many other people, I probably would discount it. I probably wouldn't take this all that seriously. So I know I'm spending a lot of time here reiterating and kind of doing a setup But I also have had so many conversations with people that just absolutely refuse to even take a look at this or be willing to read a book.

We can get into that. Why? He proved why they don't want to do it. What you said needed to be said, and you said it so well, I couldn't have phrased it better myself. There's very few people saying that. You know, you got right into the subtitle of my book, Understanding the Myths, Lies and Confusion. But, you know, why don't people want to believe it? This is a very important point, and it gets complex, which is why the book took three years to write. But one of the first things that they don't want to believe is because it feels so structural. You know, you bend over pain in the back, or you hurt your hip or knee, and you can't. Or you can't raise your arm because your shoulder. It feels so structural. People don't believe it, but emotions can do that. They can do that. And then, of course, they see with their own eyes on the imaging, on the X ray and the mri. So look right there. My pain is right at that herniation. My hip pain's right there. And I have arthritis in my hip. I've got a tear in my meniscus. Right? There's the pain. But the brain only randomly chooses that. Sometimes it's there, sometimes the disc is herniated on the left and the pain's on the right side. You know, it's just. And sometimes the brain will use it. It was a great discovery of his. The brain will sometimes target the changes in the body, so when it becomes overwhelmed and the anger rises, you know, and remember, it's unconscious. You never feel these emotions. So I get into the arguments with people. I'm not angry, I'm not stressed. You don't feel it. That's why your body has the symptoms. The body is telling you. The body saying no. Like Gabor Mate's great book title, right? The body is saying no. And so when they see these things on the imaging, they immediately associate it in their brain and it locks in. Ah, I have herniated disc. So that's two reasons people don't want to believe it. Another one is that, you know, it's all unconscious, all these thoughts and emotions you're completely unaware of. The ego screens it. And we can get into that too, which is the heart of my book, the eps. Dan o'. Mah. But the ego screens it and just cast it into the body. If it doesn't like something the people smile a lot. They're friendly even though things are going wrong. They try to act on the outside like things are okay. They keep pushing through it, but the body is saying no. And of course, the worst thing I think that causes people not to believe it is that their physicians are telling them there's something wrong with their body. And you just went over that, you said that very well. You know, they're going to all these different people, whether it's acupuncturists or chiropractic or surgeons or physical therapists. And I will say this, some of my strongest allies are chiropractors now who had severe back pain themselves and no longer manipulate people. They hand them my book when they come into the office. And surgeons, I've been doing more consults with surgeons, and they're getting it. So the word is spreading. Thanks to you, too. I mean, you've helped a lot of people. I don't even think, you know, people contact me. They may not even contact you. I say, where did you hear about it? Joe Polish told me, just what we're doing here today will save your life if you are suffering, if you have an open mind. And so this book, this new book, it's about why all this confusion, why people can't find a solution, why they don't want to believe it. You know, and of course, the reason he found that they don't want to believe it is because the brain's protecting them. Like the Helen story I just told. When we get overwhelmed, you know, it creates something that feels structural so that it's hoping you'll go to the doctor, you know, keep constantly get it worked on over and over and over. And that's exactly what the brain's praying for. Oh, yes, they're going to keep working on the body. I've done my job. I've got them diverted away from their emotions and onto the physical again. And so modern medicine has been great. It's done great in grafting and transplanting. It saved a lot of lives, but it's also destroyed a lot of lives because people are depending on it to heal them from a mind body process. And that's what the brain is hoping. Do this, do that, keep worrying and obsessing on it, keep thinking about it every day, keep OCD on it, which really rolls over into the addiction things and all these other things. But it is the greatest discovery I've ever seen. It saved my life. Dr. Sarno saved my life and millions of other lives. I do consults in dozens of Countries and they always hold his books up. Translated into 16 or 17 languages. It has to be in the millions by now. But with the advent of the Internet and things like what we're doing right now, the message is going around the physicians, around the medical industry. He went right to the people. You know, they pushed him out of teaching at nyu. You know, he quit eating in a cafeteria with the other doctors because they would turn their backs on him and not talk to him. You know what his big sin was? Helping people heal. It's really pathetic how far we've gone, how far we've fallen in modern medicine. But this is not an anti science or anti doctor message. You know, we need good doctors. We do need, you know, good medicine and we need good science. And this side of it, most of the things we have, and you said that a little bit ago, it's almost everything, you know, from the, from the way we feel. Almost everything is an emotional process. The body itself is just a structure. That's all it is. We're emotional beings. Something drives this structure and its thoughts and its emotions and its beliefs. He uncovered the Holy Grail. He really did. And of course he's beloved by millions. But there are people that despise him for the reasons you just said. Yeah.

And I will tell you, like, one thing. I'm going to mention a couple things. One, I didn't say this earlier. Probably my early 30s, I got MRIs, and way back then, I'm now 48 years old at the time we're doing this. It showed two herniated discs in my neck and two, in my low back. And I had so much chronic pain throughout my 20s and 30s and early 40s. When I go back and read old journals, I found some old journals in a trunk that I had written when I first was a dead broke carpet cleaner, living off credit cards and stressed out of my mind and trying to make a small company work and working my ass off. And I would write in journals and I would usually dump all of my negative emotions. And, you know, I didn't even recall this until I read the journal. This is almost daily. I was writing about how much my back hurt, how much my neck hurt, and probably then I was thinking, oh, because I'm cleaning carpets or this and that. But it continued on even when I went into, you know, helping other people with their marketing. And the challenge is marketing can be used for good and bad ways. I mean, Sarno was very much not much of a marketing guy. I mean, he wasn't a big promoter he didn't beat up on doctors. He would do his best knowing, even though how many of them led people in the wrong direction. This is my interpretation of him.

Of course.

You know, you're right.

I'm trying to carry the torch that he didn't do because he was a doctor, a great doctor.

He wasn't a marketer, nor did he want to come across as doing that. And unfortunately, most of the marketing that is effective is being effective in the wrong ways. They're marketing shit that isn't helping people. So I always got to remind people that hate advertising or hate marketing, it's like, look, it's how it's used. Marketing is storytelling. Selling is influence. And so you can enroll people into a bad story, you can enroll people into a lie, or you can enroll people into the truth. You can share what actually works. You actually have a great website where you actually tell. You show the stories of people. What is that called? What is that site for the.

Steve ozanich.com.

Yeah, yeah. And on there you have.

What is the hall you're talking about? All the Wall of Victory.

Wall of Victory, yes, that's what I'm referring to because I was thinking we should mention that because it would. Instead of people hearing talk about it.

Yeah. They can go look at it on YouTube or my website. You know, that's the thing. I was seeing so many thousands of people heal from my first book. It was just blowing my mind away. I don't have anyone to tell. I live alone. I'm so excited. So I thought, I'm gonna see if these people will record these for me. And so recently, a few months ago, I started asking them, hey, would you just say that? Record that? And they said, absolutely, because they fall in love with Dr. Sarno immediately too, you know, but it is an amazing process. It is getting out there and the marketing aspects of it. Like you said, the medical industry, they're experts at it. Watch a half hour worth of TV commercials, and you'll have every disease there is first. The first hint of this, you better run to your doctor. And of course, it's about drugs now. And that really is another whole can of worms to open up. You know, that's covering it over the problem, over it's not solving it. Right.

Let me mention this too, because I think there's a huge link. I mean, I'm just recently putting this together because, you know, of all the work that I'm doing with Artists for Addicts and my addiction platform and, you know, being an addict myself, you Know, like Gabor Mate, who we both know, he has this TED talk where he's talking about addiction and he says the question is not why the addiction but why the pain. And what I have to remind myself and other people is even if you're an addict behaviorally or drugs, and you're out there doing all kinds of stuff that is self destructive and it is hurting you and in some cases hurting other people, addiction is actually not a problem, although it is. And this is going to sound like semantics mixed up. Addiction is actually a solution.

Solution.

It's not a good solution. It's a solution that leads to more problems. But you know, if you think of addiction as like an itch, you know, there's nothing wrong with wanting to scratch the itch and make the itch go away. It's the method that you use in order to do it. So if your skin is really itching and you start scratching it to the point to where it's bleeding and you're ripping it off, it's actually going to get worse. And so that's what happens with addiction. However, most people that are addicts are not, you know, they're not doing this because they're wanting to screw their lives up, although it is screwing their lives up. They're trying to manage pain. It's a coping mechanism and it's a solution. And it's a solution that temporarily works, but it leaves them in a worse state. Well, I think the same thing is similar to the way you describe body pain. The body pain is trying to protect you. It is a solution. It's a shitty solution.

It hurts.

I mean, you know, you say in the preface of this book, the very first thing you say is back pain is not all in your head.

There.

I got it out of the way early on. And so a lot of people will misinterpret TMS as okay, so you're saying it's all in your head and you're like, well, no, it's real. I mean, I've had TMS symptoms that make my knees swell up to twice the size. You can see MRIs that show certain things.

But you know, a lot of people.

That are over the age of 30, 35, if you do a full body MRI, you're going to show herniations, you're going to show bulging discs. Some people have pain, others have no pain whatsoever.

Doctor, you're so right. The pain is just a crappy solution. The brain doesn't know what else to do. It still needs to cope through the day. It still needs to go through. People still need to be responsible. They still need to go to work. They still need to take care of their families. And so it's the only thing you can figure out. I will divert it to the body and I will obsess on this, and I'll just put this smiling face on every day, which I call the lie. You know, this lie that Freud called superego, Jung called Persona, whatever. Every day we move ahead, even though. So we're responsible people. But as far as the herniations, like you said in the new book, I talk about a few studies, you know, and some of the interesting ones were. One was done in 2001. It was called no stress, no whiplash. It was published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine. And they put these people in these two Volvos, and they were stationary cars and. But they simulated a crash, you know, like a Steven Spielberg thing that flipped all around and everything afterwards, 20% of the people reported neck pain. Now, their necks never moved, the body never moved, only those seen around them. Okay? A month later, 10% of the people were still reporting pain and became chronic. But the important point is that those people who reported pain later on had the highest scores on the psychosocial stress exams. In other words, they were the ones with the poor childhoods or the bad childhoods, and the hoop were demanding much of themselves. They were the ones who needed a diversion. That's the main point. You know, it's not coming from the structure. It's. The brain is looking for any outlet at all, you know, whether it's drinking or drugs or whatever. It's looking for anything that's in vogue that it can use. And carpal tunnel was in Vogue in 1994. Half a million new cases in 1994, because it was being announced all the time on the news everywhere. And they were starting to compensate people for. But then there were some cooler new studies that I cited in there. There's one by Kaitanen peka Kaitanen in 2014. They studied stenosis, the narrowing of the spine. These spines looked terrible. But they noted the people in the study who had moderate stenosis were having more trouble walking with pain than the people with severe stenosis. And that's basically proving Dr. Sarno right again. And Andrew Weil, who you know, too right, formed the Integrative Medicine Institute in Arizona. He was the keynote speaker at a pain conference. And he said these specialists held up these MRIs that these people didn't look like they could be able to walk, and yet they had no pain. He said other ones were holding up these MRIs of people that looked perfect and they were bedridden. Once again, Weil said, this proved to me that Dr. Sarno is correct. But in this new book, I cited another 2015 study by a guy named Brzezinski. They did meta analysis across the board, something like three dozen studies on herniations and things in the back. And they basically proved the same thing. There's no association, there's no cause. It just happens to be sometimes that herniation. And so all the scientific evidence that I've seen, there's over 40 studies proving that herniated discs don't cause pain. Not one single study in the medical literature that proves that it does cause pain. Pain. But everybody wants to believe the unproven side. The very same people who want proof, who demand scientific proof of tms. And so this is why that word confusion comes into my book title. You know, I'm trying to lay out the picture of everything that I'm seeing and everything that Dr. Sarno and the doctors he trained are proving every day. Clinically, it's working. It's working in the practices. The people are healing. And I've had. I had a medical doctor a couple years ago say, just because these people are healing doesn't mean it works. I didn't even know how to answer it. I thought about that for a couple of days. Then how would it work? You know, how else would it work? I think what they want is to prove it in a laboratory, controlled clinical trial, and that's the only way they'll believe it. The fact that it's actually working in real life every day doesn't mean anything to them. You know what?

And it's one of these things like, you know, look, I'm not a. I'm not a scientist, and I don't do research studies. And although I do know quite a few scientists and people that do. I mean. I mean, how would someone kind of do that? It's almost one of these things that people want to. They want to have all this evidence. Of course, my evidence is it happened to me. I mean, every freaking thing that I was doing from some of the world's greatest doctors, I would even mention who some of the doctors that I had were because they're world famous and they were wrong. And I don't want to do it, because the point here is not to shame people or call them know. The point here is I want to bring solutions to people, not complaints.

And that's a good Point I went to some of the best in the world too. I said in this new book, you know, I'm not pointing any fingers, and I'm not pointing with any particular finger. I said, you know, but they. They truly do not know about it. It's not their fault. In a way, they're trying to help. They're doing everything they can, everything that they've been taught in medical school. You know, we're not saying they're purposely out doing these things. Things. But I know I'm sure there's a small few who might be, you know, there always those people. But for the most part, doctors are trying to do good. They feel that they're doing good. But he uncovered, you know, they're actually the byproduct of. Is they're harming them. Because the more you work on the body to try to engineer it into good health from the outside, that's the problem still remaining hidden. And he had this great phrase, he would say, the brain will not be denied. You can operate on your spine, you can operate in your knee, you can take drugs for the pain. You can do everything you want, but it will find a way to bitch and piss and moan if it needs to. And something that we can move into that. He discovered what he called the symptom imperative phenomenon, which is, well, talk about that.

Because that's exactly what happened to me. Like, going back, I was. Here's what's kind of funny. I felt a tinge of pain in my knee in December, know, probably three years ago, I think it was. And it just didn't go away. It was kind of there and I never had pain in my knees that just was on for like, you know, several weeks. And I was doing P90X plyometrics at a buddy of mine's studio, a friend named Brendan Bouchard. And I was up there with my girlfriend at the time, who's still a dear friend of mine. And we were. It was super cold outside and we're like, I want to get a workout in, so let's do this. And my knee was kind of hurting, but I, you know, it was freezing out. We didn't really have a lot of time to go to a gym, which. And so we just did plyometrics off a laptop. And Tony Horton, who did the P90X videos, I've interviewed him before. You can actually listen to my interview with him online. Great stuff. And so I'm doing this and it was kind of hurting my knee. And at the end of the workout, my Knee just. I couldn't even bend my knee. And by that evening, I could not freaking walk. My knee was swollen up. And that procedure needed, like, going and getting ultrasounds and MRIs and prolotherapy and, you know, one doctor drilling into my hip and, you know, spinal. Getting my own stem cells and re. Injecting them into my knee and doing PRP injections. And then that led to, all of a sudden my feet started hurting, then my shins started hurting, and my shoulders started hurting and my wrists started hurting, and all of these different pains were happening everywhere. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? My whole body is deteriorating. Then I couldn't like I used to, and I'm traveling like crazy. And of course, you know, obviously look at my lifestyle, look at the, you know, all the stuff that I'm doing, and I'm like, go to treat one thing, and all of a sudden another part of my body is hurting. And this goes on for two years. And then the pain got so severe. That's when finally I started looking at Sarno's stuff. Because I had been spending thousands of dollars on treatment so many hours, it was completely interrupting my life. I felt my body was completely deteriorating. And here I am, a guy eating clean, trying to do. I know how to do, exercising, and I'm in constant pain and I cannot figure out what's going on. And I'm going to some of the best doctors in the world, and I have access to stuff that most people don't have access to. And I'm like, what the hell? And so.

And, you know, you're a healthy guy. You know, you're healthy. You eat pretty good.

I eat amazing compared to most people.

Yeah, right. So. So that, I guess this is the heart of my book, the heart of the new book is something that I call the EPS denomination. Denouement is a French word that means when all the pieces come together. They use it in movies a lot. You know, there's a certain part of a mystery movie when everything comes together towards the end. And I think that we can see Dr. Sarno's great work in something I call the EPS denouement. The E stands for ego. That's probably the first problem in the chain of problems. And because the ego now also, I want to say this, I've done this enough where I can see the people just nodding or rolling their eyes, you know, and getting angry. When we talk about ego, we're not talking about, you know, you're arrogant, you have a big ego. That's not what we're talking about. Ego is just something that we have that we use to help us. You know, it hides certain aspects of ourselves from ourselves and from other people. I call ego as truth's gatekeeper. It knows. It looks at the deeper self. It looks at the outer world, and it decides, it's the referee. Freud said it's the referee in the whole process. Process. It looks at you in the world and decides, this is the face I'm going to wear. This is the stuff I'm going to accept. This is the stuff I'm not going to accept. I'm going to just throw it into my body. So we're not being, you know, sarcastic to people. We say, ego's involved. Everybody's got it. And so the ego looks at certain things throughout the day, like, you know, when we're getting dumped on or when somebody dies that we loved or someone separated from us. And that's the big thing, of course, separation. And it says, all right, I'm not going to deal with it. I'll just cast it into the unconscious. Well, Candace Pert, the late Candace Pert, she just passed away. She proved that the unconscious mind is the body. Okay, so ego is the first step in this process. It doesn't like certain things. It doesn't like being overwhelmed. It wants to protect itself. And so the next phase is the p. The placebo, which may be the biggest problem of all. Why are there epidemics all over the country and all over the world? Somebody gets an operation. It didn't work. It's not coming from the spine there. It's not coming from that normal wear and tear stuff. And so as we keep doing these, it's feeding into the process. Let's just say it works. You know, oh, my pain went away. My doctor's a great surgeon. My knee feels better. Well, it's your belief that it worked. It's your belief that it worked. I'll give you a quick example that I have in the book. It's something called vertebroplasty. It was invented by some doctors at the Mayo Clinic. It's some type of cement that they inject into the bony discs of the back when you fall and you break your back. And they were. They were just so happy with themselves. You know, they'd done over a million of these things, quote, successfully. A million of them. You know, the Mayo Clinic, like you said, great reputation. But they noted there were times they injected it into the wrong disc and the person healed immediately. And so they looked at Each other. To their credit, the guy's name was David Calmes. Dr. Calms. To their credit, they said, let's set up a double blind trial. And so they did. They split him into two groups. They gave one sham injection, another one real injection. They all healed the same. Well, there was a 76 year old lady in the trial. She said, I knew they couldn't fool me. I knew they couldn't. She was up golfing again with a broken back within days with no pain, and they gave her the sham procedure. So the placebo is a big part of the confusion in all this. Those surgeries aren't really working unless you believe it. It has more efficacy if your doctor is confident in his diagnosis, if he has a good reputation and a whole complex set of psychological things. So that's the second leg of the eps Danoma. The third leg is what we just mentioned, the symptom imperative. The s. Dr. Sarno's greatest discovery. I told him on the phone, the most brilliant discovery and he's. It's number one in that book. Dr. John Sarno's top 10 healing discoveries. He answered all of our health problems. You know, when I was younger, I had all kinds of health problems and you just said, you know, my body was falling apart. You start thinking, am I this weak as a human being? Am I this weak? No, the body is very strong, extremely strong. But we're being led to believe that it's weak. And so when you get your back operated on or your knee and the procedures you just outlined there, the brain will absolutely just shift the symptom from one knee to the other knee, one shoulder to the other shoulder, from one disc to the disc above it or disc below it, which would Tiger woods is going through right now, right now. He got it operated on. Move to the disc above it. That was a great discovery by Dr. Sarno. It's called the symptom imperative. In other words, as long as you have psychological consequences, as long as you're not paying attention to it, the brain will not be denied. You can mask it over with tape if you want. It's just going to shift. And so when people think they had a successful surgery, it only shifted forms. And we've seen some weird form shifts too. People get a, you know, a disc operator on and say, oh, my doctor's a genius. It's gone. And then they won't be able to sleep for months. So it just went into restlessness. The brain will find a way to bitch and moan is until you address it. So life Keeps repeating itself until you start to pay attention.

Let me interrupt real quick and I want you to keep going. If anyone listening out there knows how to get this to Tiger woods in a way that he actually listens to it, because I know there have been some attempts to actually do that, but it's not landed yet. And you do have some famous people that you have consulted with, you know, Academy Award winners and stuff like that. We won't mention names because I know of confidentiality. There are just certain people that iOS.

Pro athletes, you know, they, everyone's got it.

So keep going and explaining this concept because it's so damn for people to.

Get so, you know, I, in this book, I tried to explain it. You know, the book is not a how to book because they're the problem. You know, when you go through these programs and how to do this and that, self help books, that's what your brain's hoping because you're doing these things. Any action that you take to try to heal is actually prolonging the problem because the brain's hoping that you're focusing. You know, just think of your symptoms as like a little shiny glittery object in the corner. You know, it wants you to stare at that and not pay attention to what's really going on underneath. And so over all these years that I've done this, I put this into something I call the EPS denouement. It all comes together if you can understand what's happening within those three elements. And each one of those is very complex in itself. It's not a simple thing. The cure can be very simple. You know, some people, you know, and some of the people actually you shouted out to my first book, I skyped with them and their pain left. They tried everything and by the time we were done, it was gone. Those are the ones that drive the other people crazy. You know, where it goes away so quickly, that's rare. It's the exception. You have not failed. If you've tried this and it doesn't work immediately, it's, you're not a failure. If it's not working immediately, all that means is you still need the diversity. That's all. You're not a failure. You haven't done anything wrong. But your brain still is trying to use the symptom to help you cope through your day. And so the idea is to never ever try to heal, ever. The idea is to take away the need for it, for the diversion, the distraction, you know, once you uncover, yeah, that's the key really is take away the need for it, you know, and you don't always have to get rid of the tension, Dr. Sarno proved, you know, but some. It helps, of course, to do the conscious breathing, you know, to try to enjoy your life more and maybe not push yourself so hard. But there are still people in positions like yourself that they heal too, with this. With this information. And so it really is deep insight. It's like, aha, light bulb moment, my hip, you know, And I see it all time. 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. A guy from Sweden contacted me. 44 years in back pain. He said, your book took it away. Away. Your book took it away. But it moved into my shoulder. He goes, help me. You know, help me. And so that's the symptom imperative. It's shifting. And so the brain gets frantic when you're onto it, you know, the truth will set us free. There's no doubt about it. When you get that deeper concept of it integrated very deeply. And it takes a while, in some people, the brain gets panicky, and what it will do, it will start spreading the pain. And they'll say, I'm getting worse. Well, no, no, I see it as you're worse winning. Because the brain is getting frantic to try to keep you diverted. And when you're realizing what's going on here, it will often spread it all across the back and neck and down the back and legs because it's scared. It's losing its tactic over you, its strategy. And so this is absolutely the greatest medical discovery I've ever seen. I mean, this is right up there with penicillin and some of the heart transplants, some of the greatest medical discoveries in history. And my job, job is to give this gift away. I was given a gift that saved my life, and I want to spend the rest of it passing the gift around to people. And you're doing a great job. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate this. I know how busy you are. Busy, busy. But you know how important this is and you know how long I've been working at this.

Oh, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And, you know, there's a lot of times where I will interview book authors and I'll interview people that, you know, have stuff that I'll recommend that they read and things like that. And a lot of times I'll do an interview with someone they don't really need to read their book in order to get tremendous value out of it. And I hope this one is the same way. However, this is one of those sort of things where you have to read the book. I mean, you have to get a deeper understanding of it because it's really, really hard to grasp this just by hearing about it. And there are so many people that I'll mention again that are in authority positions that people want to look up to, they want to believe them, that are saying, yeah, that whole TMS thing, I've kind of heard of that or maybe, or to the other flip. Other bullshit. I mean, look at this mri, look at this scan. I mean, of course you got back pain. I mean, look at what's going on. Or you got whatever sort of pain. And when you are told that by someone that your pain that has a degree that, you know, in many cases is really looking out for your best interest or trying the best they know how, it's real easy to discount everything else and to buy into that. And unfortunately, I spent over two decades of my life operating that way until all of those types of suggestions still were not making the pain go away. And the pain was getting worse. One of the things that is kind of an interesting thing I experienced, I was talking to one of my genius network members earlier today named Craig Ballantyne, who wrote a book called the Perfect Day Formula. He's one of the guys, one of the first Internet online fitness training programs and stuff, and just a really bright guy. And I was telling him about how I'm getting ready to do an interview with you. And I told him about. I used to every few weeks when I would lift weights, you know, which I've been doing for, you know, hell since my 20s. And I would be using what I believed was really good form, not killing myself, you know, trying to push beyond my quote unquote limits. Although I know Sarno has this thing where people say I lifted something that was too heavy. And I think Sarno said if it was too heavy, you wouldn't have been able to lift it anyway. You're the one that told me that, by the way. And I would like, you know, do like a shoulder press and using good form. And then I'd feel this kind of like. Like this pull or this tension in my shoulder, and then I put the weight down and I would go through the ritual. Damn it. Oh, what did I do?

I tweaked it.

And then what would happen over the next, you know, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, the pain would set in and then it would get progressively worse. And then for the. The next two to seven days, I couldn't turn my head really. Well, it hurt like crazy. I'd go into the gym and try to do legs or try to avoid, you know, straining that area and it would throw me off. And this went on, I'm not kidding you, a hundred times. And then right after I did my first Skype call with you and I had not even read your damn book, the Great Pain Deception. When I first found you online, I just called you and said, hey man, can I pay you to do a Skype call? And you're like, sure. And so now you've turned it into like a process that you actually offer people. And I did that call with you. Within a couple of weeks the pain was 95% gone. That had been massively severe and it's not come back ever since. Now, of course, I was reading your books, I was listening to John Sarno audios, which you know, people can get online, blah blah, blah. And I went to the gym and I had the same thing that had happened to me so many times before. And my brain was so used to, I know what's going to happen, here's what's going to go down. And I literally, when I was done working out, I kind of mellowed out. I did a couple of more things just to kind of stretch a little bit and try to, you know, try to make sense of. Okay, well, I just learned more about TMS recently than anything before. And I sat in my car at the gym and I said, okay, what is my mind trying to tell me or wherever it's coming from, like what is going on in my life? What am I trying to avoid? And there in the car the pain went away and I am so not a foo foo person. Although I'm open to all kinds of weird stuff because I really don't. You never know, right? Yeah, yeah, as best as I can be. Although many people that think there's open, open minded are sometimes the most close minded people on the planet. I mean, I know there's a lot of people listening here that are totally closed minded and they think they're open minded while they're saying bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. And these are the people that of course are going through severe pain and will probably be stuck there until they can shift that. So I literally was sitting in my car just really saying, okay, tms what is going. And it freaking went away. And I was like, wow. I mean there. And that was kind of like an aha moment. And I'll tell you, here's a confession that I want to share with everyone, which is really interesting. And you know this because I share this with you. I have had some back pain in my lower back for the last several days, and usually I can make it go away. And today's interview was like, in the past, I would always start going and getting treatments, and I would start doing this, and I would start getting all fearful and worried and, oh, my God. And the pain, of course, not only would not go away, would stay there, and in many cases, it just got worse or would move to something else. And I'm doing an experiment saying, you.

Know, this is one of the times.

Where I'm feeling some pain. I'm positive it is not structural. I didn't do anything that, you know, would have, quote, unquote, hurt my back or whatever. However, what I am going through is a severe amount of a very overwhelming schedule, and there's a lot of stuff on my plate, and there's many reasons why I would be experiencing tension right now. And what happens is my brain is trying, like our friend Gabor Mate says, when the body says no, and there's something going on that's trying to tell me. And the pain is a sign. It is a signal. And my whole thing is, you know what? This is a perfect time to really embrace this with your new book and everything. And in the prep for this interview with pain, I started again, really going through your new book and doing this today. And I will tell you what's even kind of funny is right now, as I'm sitting there talking to you, I have no pain in my back. And it is the most bizarre thing, and it sounds ridiculous and crazy to people that have never experienced something like this. However, there's.

There is such.

There's something going on here that is so damn important that I just want to convey it and share it with other people. And I'm also my own human lab rat. Because even with the stuff I'm doing with addiction, you know, that I'm doing a documentary and I'm doing all kinds of different forms of, you know, things that I'm exploring and filming and, you know, the craziest things that, you know, that are on the fringe for some people. But I'm really, you know, I'm really doing a lot of stuff to figure it out. And I've always been my own human lab ratio. And that's kind of where I'm at today. And that is kind of what's been going on. The difference is I actually know the solution to it, which leads into, you know, I want to. You know, I want you to say anything that obviously my whole little rant here brought to mind. You know, I want to lead to, as we wrap up this episode, which could, you know, I want to do a continual follow up is, you know, what the people need to do to heal. Because at the end of the day, anyone that's listening to this, that is having, you know, pain, whatever levels of severity to family members that are debilitated by it. I mean, that's what if more than anything, it's like, how do we heal? And I'd like to get your guidance on that. So that's, that's kind of where I'm at.

Sure. Yeah. And of course, that's the whole idea, right? We want to make people feel better. It's, it's a, it's a cool thing to help people. It's the most rewarding thing I've ever done and I appreciate your help, but, you know, the first thing we always have to say is you've got to get an exam. You know, you've got to. Because I saw a case where a guy had back pain and he had an aneurysm in there. That's not tms. You know, the blood begins to pool and it creates a pain. I saw a case where a guy had a tumor in there. That's not tms. Okay, so be responsible with our, with our lives. You know, they're very precious. And Dr. Sarno always would say, you know, protect the life first. If you've got an ulcer, which is coming from tension and stress, right, Take the medicine. Don't bleed to death. Take the medicine. Right, but try to get off. But try to figure out why you got the ulcer in the first place. Because the symptom imperative will kick in. They take the medicine, they get rid of the ulcer, and then they get severe back pain. The brain will not be denied. So go get an exam. Be cautious. We're not medical experts here. We're just trying to help some people. Then the next thing, if you've been chronic, of course, you know, and that could be anything. Sometimes people get pain only over the holidays. That's chronicity. You know, it's triggered by emotions and memories of the past. And the first time you get something, the next time you see those same sensory triggers, you'll get it again because of the, you know, Pavlov's dog effect, which is called association or conditioning. And so once you've got an exam, make sure that your life is not in danger and you get the normal things like an algae or an itis or herniation. Or stenosis, whatever it is. You have to take that with a grain of salt. Start buying the books on TMS. Look into it. Start reading. Start gathering the information. Dr. Sarno said, you know, knowledge is the penicillin to this disorder. So read, gather it. Try to associate it with yourself. Do you fit the personality type? Which we really didn't get into much either. You know, there are things when you go to see a TMS physician, you know, they look at the imaging quickly and they pretty much cast it aside. You know, if you're not dying, it pretty much doesn't mean anything. They still have to look at it. Then they get into your life. What was your relationship like with your parents? You know, were they in your life? You know, were you abandoned? Did you have trauma? Do you worry a lot? Are you. Do you drive yourself? These red flags go up all over the place, and then they come to a conclusion. And so the diagnosis of TMS is a diagnosis of exclusion. They look at the most dangerous thing, and then they back out of it, and they keep backing out. And so if you see yourself on the pages of these TMS books, you know, start to put your life together, piece it together with an open mind, of course. And so you've got to get psychologically into this. You got to get out of the physical ballpark. He would say, stop trying to inject it or stop going to physical therapy. Stop. Stop bending it or stretching it. Every time your mind's eye obsesses on your body, that's what it wants. It's hoping you do that.

And so I got to say something to that, too. Where the pain really went away from me is when I quit going and doing all the treatments. I used to get adjustments all the time. I used to do a lot of stuff. And again, some of these things, you know, I'm not here to poo poo those things as per se bad. It's just the way that I was utilizing them and the way most people do, they're bad. And when I go get massages now, I don't go to get massages because my back is messed up. I go to get massages because it feels good. I go to get massages because it's, you know, I frame it as I'm doing it because it's an enhancement technique. It's not because I'm screwed up. It's not because my body is hurt. And that thing is going to fix it. Because when I used to go for that reason, the pain never went away.

Yeah, that's a Good. That's a good point. I'm glad you brought that up. When I do consults, I usually bring that point up. Any action that you take to heal is detrimental to you if you have this syndrome, of course. And so anything like that. The deeper brain knows why you're doing it. Let's just say you're stretching to get rid of pain. The brain knows why you're stretching. Stretch because it feels good, because you want to be limber, because you want to be well, for wellness. When you get a massage, go do it because it feels good to reduce the. Don't do nothing for pain reduction. Do it just to live, to go back to become fully active again.

Yeah, and I gotta mention this, too. Like, I have a friend who I've introduced you to, I will not mention the name, who did a series of documentaries on alternative health and doctors and things. And he had interviewed hundreds of alternative doctors in all kinds of different fields to, quote, unquote, help people with all kinds of symptoms, including pain. And I introduced him to your book. He read the whole book, started to incorporate it, started to share it with other people, and, you know, reached out to me a few months after he was introduced to this, and he'd be like, I would love to do a documentary on this guy and on the subject matter, but my doctors would want to lynch me because it totally goes against everything that they believe in. And, you know, there's some wild stuff.

It's a good point. That reminds me of something I have in the new book I talked about. There were three prestigious pain clinics in the world that contacted me recently to thank me. And it's amazing. The one scientist said, we watched one of the pain patients healing right in front of our eyes with your book, and we couldn't do anything for two years. And the scientist said, I want to personally think, thank you. My own back pain is gone because of your book. But now one of them was in Glasgow, one was in Michigan, and another one was at Cleveland Clinic. And they all didn't want me to mention their names. No, no, no, you can't, because they know it will affect their career. The one person in the one pain clinic stood behind a plant in her office, and I couldn't hear, and I kept going, what? She was. I'm talking on my cell phone. I can't let anyone hear me. But thank you. She had hip pain for, like, nine years. And once again, this may sound bizarre. And Dr. Sarno said, in Healing Back Pain, this may all sound like something out of Grimm's fairy tales. But it works. And it works virtually every single time. This message that we're talking about now is changing the world every day. And thanks to the Internet and people like you, you, lives are being changed, Suffering is being eased. But it is truly, truly an amazing process. So if you really want to heal, you get that exam. Start reading the TMS information, get into their psychology. Look at yourself. Do you see yourself on every page of these books? You know, why hasn't anything worked for you? You know, this is all about self work, by the way, too. I can't heal people. I'm not a healer, right? I tell people, you know, you have to do this. Your brain is creating this to help you. Your brain, your deeper self, through the ego, through the ego's direction, has decided, I am going to help this person. So you have created this pain. Only you can get rid of it. I can't do it. Nobody can heal you from the outside. The work has to be done from the inside. And knowledge is the first place to start by reading the books. But knowledge is something that can be passed to other people. Knowledge is something that can be transferred, it can be sold, it can be taught to other people. But you cannot transfer wisdom. Wisdom is innate to you personal. It's something that you know, that light inside of you. And that's where the true healing comes. It begins with knowledge. Until we've mentioned a couple of times here, these light bulb, aha moments, that's the wisdom. And when you finally realize that at this deeper aspect of your brain, oh, my God, I've been doing this to myself. I remember that great scene with Dr. Sarno in 2020 with John Stossel. Stossel had what, 20 years of pain. One meeting with Dr. Sarno disappeared. And he put his face in his hands and he said, it's so embarrassing. I've been doing it to myself. In a way, it is kind of embarrassing, I guess. But guess what? You were trying to survive in your world with all the demands you've placed on yourself. And so these are good people. There's nothing wrong with. With it. It's part of the human condition to have this. It's nothing to be embarrassed of, you know, And I want to say this too, before we're done here. When Dr. Sarno spoke, people leaned in and listened, like E.F. hutton, because he was a humble man. He's still a very humble man. I say was because he's retired, very humble. And he didn't, didn't brag, you know, and he, when he would say things, we would listen. He said at the end of his career. Career. I've come to the conclusion these people are suffering because they're good people. And I could write a book on that. That is such a great insight between, you know, we could be bad people, we could be hedonists, but these people have chosen to be good. They've chosen to try to take care of people. They've chosen to push themselves, to make people happy, to help other people. And so it is a great insight, you know. And so I made fun of it in the first book. Goodism, Goodhistitis, I said inflammation of the low self esteem. It comes from a personality. So our health problems are primarily the result of our personality, not our bodies. And one of the people that really.

Doctor, do this, do this. I know we're past time, but I'm going to go a little longer because this is so damn important. Explain the personality type to describe the type of person. Although there are assholes that get TMS too, of course, but there's a lot of sensitive good people that are trying to be perfectionists. I certainly would put myself in that category. I try to do the right thing. I do genuinely care about, I want to be helpful and to a fault. I will overextend myself. I will put things into my plate, be it from low self esteem or whatever. I mean, even Gabor Mate when I first met him, he knows about me being abandoned as a kid. My mother died when I was 4. My father never remarried. I had a pretty crappy childhood. And this is not like oh poor me, because there are people that have endured stuff I can't even imagine. I was molested as a kid. I mean, all the reasons I became an addict in life. Makes sense. If you go back and see what I would consider, consider, you know, trauma that I would always discount. I would, oh no, it's not so bad, you know, and I, when I first told Gab Bohr, he's like, stop. Like are you kidding me? You know, okay, yeah, you know, quit trying to make excuses like, you know, other people had it worse. Yeah, a lot of people have it bad. However, you know, look at this sort of stuff, so it sort of makes sense. And I would try to compensate because you know, I mean, being an addict, you do bad shit, you know, I mean, you put yourself in shameful situations, you know, you do things that are not self destructive.

You know, we can't finish without talking about it. You're right, it's a good point. This is critical personality is the thing that causes most of the health problems. You know, one of the people that really gets this is Lyssa Rankin. I don't know if you know who that is or not. She's a. She was a medical doctor and she's got her own books out now on mind, body healing. And she gets it. You know, the body is just a report card or the reflection of your personality, your relationships, your history. And so the health at any one state is the strength of your relationships, especially the one with the self. But there was a great 2000 Medscape interview that Dr. Sarno did. And he said almost all the people that would sit in front of us would say, you know, I did not have enough emotional support as a child. That's where you. What you just touched on, which is so critical. I discovered on my own, just working with so many people and in my own life that it is the separations in our life when the parents aren't there early on or they die or they divorce, or there's constant arguing or there's a molestation, I see those quite a bit too. This is a rejection by the child. They feel broken. And when somebody dies and leaves them, every child blames themselves every time it's me. And so there's like a type of self punishment almost going on there inside the person. They get angry that people left that. I've seen Paul McCartney talk many times about John Lennon. When they were drunk late at night, John Lennon would cry, he said, and say, why are all the men leaving me in my life? Because his dad pushed him aside to an uncle who, like, died. And man to man to man, they kept leaving him. He was blaming himself again, what's wrong with me? And so Dr. Sarno would have some people come in as older couples to his practice, and they would have pain syndromes because they had just lost a spot. See, once again, separation. He would get them to understand that you're deeply angry that the person left you. You are alone now. And I can see directly to the very source of all of these problems. It is loneliness. I can see it in every single person I've ever talked to and even in myself, this idea that we are separate beings. And of course, that's ego again. Ego is at the very heart of all of ourselves suffering. The word ego means me or I as a separate being. And so we try to be good. We try to make people happy because we don't want to get rejected by them again, to be alone again. So we're always trying to make Other people happy around us because we fear the one thing is being isolated, alone, darkness, without anything or anybody. And so that's the true heart of it, is this idea of isolation. And when I first saw Dr. Sarno's work in the late 1990s, I could see where he was going with this. I went out and got all the work of Alan Watts. I don't know if you remember who that was. Yeah, he. He went to China for like what, 20 years and brought back the ancient ways. And the first VHS tape I had back then, I put in of him. He said, we suffer in the west from pain and disease because we are isolated. And boy, that was one of the biggest light bulbs over my head. Yes. Even in my marriage at the time and in my life, you know, you feel like you're going it alone. People don't mind having hard work. People actually like hard work. Do you? Bound in? We want to do all these things, but the thing that's making us enraged is that we're doing it alone. We don't have any support. The pain would simply fade, you know, and so, so you can see why it gets complex. And that's why I wrote the last book, because I wanted to try to fill in the gaps from the first couple books and to try to explain what I'm seeing. It's not a how to book, but you will heal if you believe everything's in it and you understand that everything is in it because it's about learning.

Let me say this too, because this is a difficult thing for people to sell because there's no real like, oh, you have to be taking these supplements or you have to keep coming to continual treatment or here's an expensive piece of equipment that I need to pay for. So I need to put you in the continual repeat business. If someone buys your book, there's nothing else that you're trying to sell them. Now, of course, course, the thing that I always encourage you to do is deepening the education because I actually think if you charge people money for stuff, they'll go deeper with it. It's not about what you're charging the money for. It's the fact that they're placing some commitment and emphasis on it. If you have a conversation with someone for free, which you do almost to a fault, as do I, where I've always said charge them. I mean, if people don't pay, they don't pay attention. And there are certain times where people that will have the ability to share your message with a large list that I'LL encour you to talk about and you have done that and they've been very helpful. However, my whole thing is if you charge people, they at least for some reason they tend to pay attention. Like even if you give someone a book, like, people come to me all the time. I have my new marketing book on health marketing, how to create an easy, lucrative and fun business. And I've got my I love marketing podcast and different podcasts and stuff I do. I mean, I put the vast majority of information that I share with the world, it's free. I mean, people don't need to buy anything from me. I, I mean there's hundreds of hours of content. It's not some tricky setup where I'm going to tease people. I mean, I give people the very best value I know how to give them and I do it with the assumption of if you love what I put out there for free and it creates value, then if you're a high level person, you'll maybe join Genius Network, you'll maybe go into one of those things. And most of the people that give me money gladly give me money because they got so much value for me for free, they're like, whatever. I sort of have this whole perspective on if you give someone a book for free, which I would love to just give your book away to everyone that has pain for free. The challenge with that is someone that pays a few dollars for it, they literally show up with a different sort of attention. They show up with a different sort.

Of listening in the game. Yeah, exactly.

And so what I want to encourage people to do with this, I really want you to buy the book. And I'm going to even go out to all of my clients because I train high level entrepreneurs that are very driven, very type A, very achievement oriented. The vast majority of them are genuinely very caring, amazing people. And a lot of them suffer with pain, addiction, anxiety, add. Many of them didn't build their successful businesses out of inspiration. They did it out of desperation. They redirected it into because of trauma. And they're literally just trying to compensate for a lot of stuff. And so I kind of get the personality type because I'm, I'm one of them, right? And so, you know, part of me is like, you know, let me just send you Steve's book. And I may do that for some people, but the vast majority, I'm going to say go and buy it because that act of doing that is huge.

And that you might be ready to start healing if you, if you do it Right, right.

And secondly, if anyone's listening to this, I would encourage you hire Steve. I'm going to ask you to give out your contact info. I don't want anyone to leech off of you. You're a busy guy. One of the things I know about Steve is he's a really nice guy. And someone will hire you for a Skype call for an hour, and sometimes you'll be on the phone with him for two hours. Of course, I always tell you, don't do that. If someone wants to go over an hour, pay you for the second hour. Because I believe people should get paid for what it is they do, especially if they've put their life into learning and sharing something. So anyone that reaches out to you, I want them to do it respectfully. If they want personal consulting with you, I would like them to buy the book. And if you have anyone in your life that would benefit from this, do it. And if you are one of the people that have a podcast or have a blog or have a big following or writes articles or has access to other people that need to do it, contact Steve, because he will do interviews with the right person. But if you only have, like, 10 people that listen to your podcast, please don't waste his time. If you do have a good following, though, and you want to get this message out, do it after you've read his book. Do it after you've proven for yourself that what we're talking about actually is legit, and share this message. Because my number one goal here is to help reduce suffering for people, and there's nothing in this for me. Steve's not paying me any money. We've never exchanged money. I mean, I've bought many of your books from my clients, and I've recommended you to a lot of people, but you've never paid me a penny. And part of it is what you have done is you have given me an education, and that education has helped reduce pain. And you're a guy who has your byproduct of your own. You know your own stuff. And so, you know, my whole thing is just share this with people and get it out there. So that's kind of like my recommendation. So that being done, is there anything else that I should have asked you or any topics that we did not cover that need to be shared? And then I'd like you to give out information, anything else you can say about what can your book do for people that you haven't already mentioned? And then we'll let people know either how to personally, you know, hire you if they want to do that. Or, you know, what we really want to do is just get this message into people's hands and recommend people go to Amazon or your website and get your damn book.

Yeah, sure. You know, I released it last Friday. It went to number one the next day. Backed off a few spots. I see. But, you know, the whole idea is to get people back to living their lives with their families and healthy and happy again. That's my goal. And I know that's your goal, too, but you're right, it is so damn difficult to market because not that many people believe in it. Those who do believe in it virtually all heal. But those who don't, that just means that they still need the diversion. That's all. I was asked to speak in Fort Lauderdale last year in front of 16,000 people. And I looked at the guest speakers, you know, acupuncturist, chiropractor, all these people. I said, okay, I would like to do that, but you do realize I'm going to stand up there and say that every one of your other speakers is wrong. All I heard was a car door slamming and tires peeling out of the temple. They did not return in the email. So, you know, all these people, it's their livelihood. You know, they have vested interest in it. I mean, you're going to take food away from their family. No. So they're not that interested in it, of course. And so the message moves along slowly, but it's like a slow burning fire across the world. It is just amazing to watch it in so many countries. In Colombia, I just did a consultation. The girl was crying, and she was feeling better. There's something about knowing what's going on that frees the body from its need to be diverted. And he. Dr. Sarno said he believed we'll probably never know. The brain is so complicated. It's probably difficult to understand. He believed that it made the rage less threatening. It's the emotions you don't want to come out, that the ego is hiding. And so you're burying them so that these symptoms act like a lid to keep everything down. And so when you understand what's going on, it's like, oh, it's almost a sense of relief. And so it's very common for people to contact me. I was 50% better after your first or second chapter, because now there's an answer. You know, finally, you know, tension rises, and we don't know what the hell's going on with our body. When you were experiencing the spreading of all your pain, it's. It's spreading because I don't know what the hell's going on. I've tried everything. So anger rises proportionately. And of course, Dr. McKenzie, who helped me write the book, too, he. He. He was one of the geniuses of separation rage. And he said that the anger that's associated with all these symptoms is directly proportional, proportional to how helpless you are at the time. So children, very anxious, very helpless, you know, and so that's where it begins. You didn't suddenly get TMS in your adulthood. It started forming in childhood. And most people that I work with, they can look back and say, ah, I had it my whole life.

That's where addiction. That's where addiction comes from for most people, too. I mean, there are traumatic experiences that happen in adult life. There are, you know, things like people going to war and, you know, and it's so intense. However, even people that are going to war, like, for instance, I have a friend named Phil Rand. I never pronounce his name wrong all the time. He has American Dream U, which they help educate soldiers after, you know, they get out of the military and help them, you know, become entrepreneurial. And he said that, you know, the stat that people throw around in America right now is, you know, 22 to 28 soldiers a day commit suicide. And he says, on our most recent research, what we're finding is over 50 soldiers a day in the United States are committed suicide.

A lot of that's tms. You know, if you go to tms, Healing Wall of Victory. We talked about that earlier on YouTube. I started this wall. I'd like to build a massive wall of thousands of people who have healed. So the world cannot deny this, they cannot ignore it. It's going to be so high. You know, Donald Trump's going to build it, damn it. I'm going to make Mexico build it. But anyway, I had. I had an email, December 24, day before Christmas this past year, and it was from a soldier, and it was my greatest Christmas gift by far. He had been in Iraq, was hit by an IED bomb. Said it flipped his vehicle up 6ft in the air and flipped it. We came home and severe foot pain. He had all kinds of surgeries on his feet, of course, and he was getting worse and worse when he came home, because, you know, this is part of the ongoing trauma and all these things. And he said, you know, I was thinking of looking at my little girl. And he said, I'm going to be chasing her around in A wheelchair. Soon he goes, I was thinking of ways to commit suicide, and I found your book. He said, I now chase her around the yard. I walk as long as I want. They go in the yard. And to me, that was the greatest Christmas gift I could have ever been given. So if you go to that wall of victory, there's a lady on there, Allison, her husband was in the military, and she. When she read my book, she realized every time he's deployed, the separation. She was worried about him. Her back would spasm for 17 years. She had back pain. It's gone now, but she mentions on that video that they had a friend who committed suicide. And she said it was obviously tms. And so it's a good thing you brought that up too. And I actually recently applied for a military grant to try to help the people coming back. They call it ptsd, but I would call it tms, the Mind Body Syndrome. You know, they're suffering from fear, anxiety, anger, all of those things, the traumas. And they come back, their doctors, and they run them through like they're doing the Tiger Woods. They run them through the ringer, oh, we'll try this and this and this, and they're getting worse until they're committing suicide. I didn't hear that figure till you just said that. But that's.

Again, I don't know those exact stats. This is something that will share with me, but also in the world of addiction, I think currently there's 74 people a day that are dying from opiate addiction. And now again, and, you know, we can't say everything's tms. And I alsothere's many factors of what I've learned from addiction, like nutrition as an example. I mean, you know, if you don't fix the gut of an addict and where the dopamine and serotonin is produced in the gut and produced in the brain, it's biochemical. You know, definitely. You gotta have, you know, sound nutrition. But a lot of addicts have tms. A lot of TMS people have addictions. I mean, these are responses to pain, they're responses to trauma. And, you know, at the end of the day, there's nothing more sad to me than seeing somebody that is just simply trying to get better, better. And they're putting time, they're putting money, they're trying to put beliefs into something, and it's not working. And they're getting. And no one can figure it out. And then you share with them a key, you share with them a solution, because the same way that I was a deb row carpet cleaner living off credit cards. I was, you know, in my opinion, I was a good guy. I really cared, I really worked hard. And I unfortunately had to learn that there's no relationship between being a good human being and getting paid. There's no relationship between being good at your craft and getting paid. There's a huge relationship between being good, learning about how to get your message out and then getting paid. And the same thing here. There's no relationship between healing and what an expert is telling you, if it isn't the right advice, if it isn't the right identification of what is actually wrong. And so what I really want to encourage people to do is explore this for yourself. Take everything we said is just information and you can prove, prove it to yourself. That will require you though to have to read the book. That will have to require you to be incredibly open minded. That will require you in some cases to put on blinders to everything that you have been told before. That hasn't worked for you right now. So it's like, you know, if what you're trying is not working, you may want to explore something else. You may want to look at it. And I know, I absolutely know that this has and will help millions of people if we can at least get it to those people and those people can at least be in a recession state to explore it. And there are many conditions that are exasperated by how people are responding to the stress of life by trying to be a good human being, by their personality. And so this has it all. So Steve, what is your website and any contact information you want to give out. And then we will leave it up to the, to our listeners to go out and you know, we lead a horse to water and so sure, you.

Know, I, and of course when you said that, it reminded me what I tell people in the consult. You know, remember the definition of insanity, right?

Yep. The Einstein quote.

And so you keep doing the same thing and you're still not getting anywhere. It's not going to work. It becomes insane at some point. But yeah, you can get me@steveozanich.com I would be welcome to help anybody. I look forward if anybody's. It will change your life. I see it work almost every day. I can't say every single day, of course, but sometimes four and five people a day. Oh my God, I couldn't find an answer and I'm fine now, you know, so look me up. You can go on YouTube and find me and the new book of course is called Back Pain, Permanent Healing. Understanding the Myths, Lies, and Confusion. It's been out about a week, and it'll come out in paperback in a couple.

Well, by the time they hear this, it might be several weeks, but I'll get this out as soon as I can. And the way you spell Ozanich is Steve. S, T, E, V, E, O Zanich. O, Z as in Oz. A, N as in Nancy, I C as in Charlie, H as in help or hope. Steveozanich.com is the website and you can get the book. You can also get the book on Amazon or wherever you know this book is sold. Back Pain, Permanent Healing, Understanding the Myth, Lies, and Confusion. If people do want to set up a consult with you, they can find out about that at your website, Steve.

Yes. Yes, sir. Yeah, they could contact me and I try to answer everything. It's hard, especially.

Well, here's what I would say because, you know, I don't want to open up the floodgates here. You know, don't reach out to Steve just to, you know, ask him questions for free or have him be a free advisor, because unfortunately, that's not how he's going to help the most people. If you want to pay him for his advice and do that, you know, hiring for a Skype call, that's what I originally did the first time I reached out to you. I wasn't asking you to consult for me for free. I was like, my first thing to you is, can I hire you and pay you money to hop on a Skype call with me? And you did, and I was glad to pay you. And I referred a lot of people to do that. And the feedback that I get from almost everyone is incredibly positive. And so that's the deal. Any final last words that you want to share?

No. I can just say, you know, you can heal. If the body's not healing, something is blocking it. The body, by nature's design, knows how to heal itself. It just does it automatically. If it's not healing, you know, something is blocking it. And so look into this, you know, and I want to end with thanking you. You know, you are the busiest guy that I know. Of course you're going to have this. And that's another great discovery of Dr. Sarno's. He called TMS an emotional barometer. In other words, if the pressures get too high, your brain will give you a symptom. And so that's a warning sign, you know, okay, back off a little. So I know you're busy, and I know you know you're doing this for free and I know how much you like to help people. So I appreciate the platform to shout this out. I want to move books, but I want to help people. I want to make money so I can help people. Well, that's all. The more I make, the more I can help. My goal's never have been to be filthy rich. I enjoy what I'm doing dramatically. It's a really nice life. But I want to be successful enough so that I can help more people because Dr. Sarno's retired some of the other people he retired that he trained. And I like to take up the torch and help as many people as I can. So thanks Joe. I appreciate it.

You're welcome. And to all the listeners, thank you. Share this message, this information with anyone that that you believe needs to hear it. And please leave your comments. Wherever I post this episode, I'll probably post it as a bonus episode on 10xtalk.com on Ilove Marketing at our new Artists for Addicts platform and we'll just put it out and share it wherever it can reach the most people. And I would appreciate anyone that would share this message also and just get it out to as many people as possible. So have a wonderful day and thanks Steve and we'll talk about again soon.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of I Love Marketing. If you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes and the special resources for this episode, please visit ilovemarketing.com healthylife that's ilovemarketing.com Healthylife if you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network Annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com.

Sam.