My Personal Chronicle of Pain

Excerpted from
Pain Free for Life: : The 6-Week Cure for Chronic Pain - Without Surgery or Drugs
By Scott Brady, M.D., William Proctor

My journey of discovering how to lead patients out of chronic pain didn't start in medical school, during residency, or even after years of medical practice. It started with pain -my own pain...

... Five years of chronic pain in my lower and upper back.

... Five years of pain taking over my life-disrupting everything that I loved and enjoyed.

...Five years of dealing with expert physician after expert physician-all trying hard to help but not able to offer anything except the standard solutions taught by body-medicine specialists from their own medical training.

...Five years that culminated in my midthirties, when the last orthopedic physician I saw said to me: "Scott, you've got the back of an eighty-year-old. You have diffuse degenerative disks, herniated disks, and a dehydrated spine. You'll be in pain the rest of your life-so you'd better get used to it."

At that moment, one path ended, and another began-a new path that not only got me completely out of pain, but also taught me how to help hundreds of fellow sufferers.

In the Beginning

In retrospect, even though the severe and chronic pain started in my thirties, the seeds were planted when I was a boy. It all started with the personality characteristics I developed as a kid: traits of a Perfectionist and an approval-seeking People-Pleaser. People with either of these personalities are pain-prone. People with both are pain-probable. In other words, it is virtually inevitable that they will experience one or another type of chronic pain in their life.

I have four children-four wonderful girls-and I've observed firsthand how God seems to give every child a special personality predisposition from the womb. I've also seen how the influence of parents, friends, and outside pressures can enhance and magnify these personality predispositions. I've seen it in my own children - and I experienced it myself as a young boy.

As early as elementary school, I remember being extremely concerned with getting things right and doing things right. Although I wasn't outwardly an overemotional kid, I took to heart the innocent ridicule of classmates and friends. My habit was to internalize the hurt-to keep it to myself for fear of looking emotional.

When the pressures of getting things right or being liked by others increased, I often experienced stomach cramps and diarrhea. Sometimes I woke up with stomach cramps that kept me out of school that day. It wasn't that I was consciously avoiding school - but I think something subconscious inside me certainly was!

I think my mom and dad wondered if I was faking Monday-morning stomach cramps, because the pain would usually get better about thirty minutes after my sister had left for school. But I knew the pain was real. In those days, I think the common term for what I was experiencing was nervous stomach. And that was just the beginning.

In junior high, I was one of the new kids in school after being sent to a new school district. I didn't know many classmates, and I wasn't part of the popular crowd. To make matters worse, I fell behind in several of my classes. Before long, the stomach cramps worsened-with the symptoms always peaking just after my two most enjoyable classes, gym and shop, and just before my least favorite, English and algebra.

I remember saying to my mom, "I don't know why I get those pains. Maybe it's because I've finished all the fun classes, and I don't have anything to look forward to."

As I would learn much later, that statement was more correct than I realized.

In an effort to find a cure, my parents took me to several doctors, an experience that created more stress for me than anything else. I can still remember drinking a repulsive chalky milk shake for one test. While all the medical tests came back negative, one physician did suggest when I was about twelve years old that I might be developing an ulcer.

From My Bowels to My Back

One day when I was a teenager, my mother, a physical therapist, saw me bending over when I wasn't wearing a shirt. As she looked closer, she noticed that my spine was curved. Deciding that I probably had a mild case of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine, she referred me to one of her physical therapist colleagues, who planted an idea in my mind that would later have a huge impact on my life and my future.

"Your back is abnormal-it's curved," the therapist said, looking at some X-rays. "You don't have pain now, but you probably will. Try these special exercises twice a day. They should help postpone the pain that you'll probably experience later in your life."

Up to that point, I had never experienced one day of back pain. But her interpretation of the X-rays and medical tests, and her unfortunate words, fixed in my mind the notion that my back was abnormal and weak. I actually saw the curvature in one X-ray-there was no missing it. So I assumed that back pain was likely going to be a part of my future. Her prediction of my back pain turned out to be correct, but the cause was not what she thought.

Enter the Perfectionist and People-Pleaser

As one who set impossibly high standards for himself-a Perfectionist-I didn't like to do anything unless I could do it exactly right. If I made a mistake, any mistake, I wanted to cover it up or deny that I really couldn't get it right. My mom remembers that I wouldn't even try the hula hoop in public until I had perfected it myself after hours of secret practice in the side yard.

I've often thought that the life slogan for the Perfectionist should be: You must live with pressure! Perfectionists always gravitate toward pressure from without, and manufacture even more self-imposed pressure from within.

At the same time, as a People-Pleaser, I was under the constant pressure of needing to be liked and accepted by classmates and friends-and girls. I hated dances and other group events where it might become apparent that, because I couldn't dance, no girls would want to be around me. To the People-Pleaser, rejection isn't just unpleasant-it's huge, a situation to be avoided at all costs. When the People-Pleaser feels unliked or rejected by others, the emotional pain is often accompanied by physical symptoms, such as loss of appetite, abdominal pain, and cramping-all pains with which I was intimately familiar.