The Mystery of Emotions and Illness

A few years ago, a friend, Greg, and I were talking at a park where we were having a picnic. He complained that his right shoulder had been painful for over a year. Nothing helped. He took medications and went to physical therapy. He even went to an orthopedic surgeon, who told him he had a rotator cuff tear. However, there was no injury. The shoulder just started hurting. It gets better, then worse, and doesn’t ever go away. He was driving for Uber and had a hard time turning left because he couldn’t lift his right shoulder. That movement induced more pain. He mostly wanted to avoid surgery at all costs. But he wondered why he had so much pain and what he could do about it, besides an operation.

The shoulder is a common issue with many people. They live with chronic pain until they can’t function in some way.

“I can’t carry my grandchild.”
“It’s painful to clean the house.”
“I can’t do my work.”
Or “Even getting dressed hurts!”

They then go to an orthopedic surgeon who orders an MRI scan which shows one or more tendons with tears.

A shoulder joint is not a “ball and socket” like a hip. The body side has a “fossa” which is a little one-inch diameter cupped bone. The arm side is a ball, allowing this amazing joint to move more than 360 degrees! The shoulder joint is one of the most mobile in the body, at the expense of stability.

There are ligaments surrounding it to generally hold it in place. But a group of five tendons called the “rotator cuff” attach to muscles on the arm and body to pull the arm into the body with each type of movement. Without those tendons and ligaments, the shoulder would literally just fall out of its socket. A “rotator cuff tear” is when one or more of those tendons tears. Usually it is a partial tear, but sometimes the tendon can be completely ruptured, requiring surgical repair.

The big question is, how does this happen? The shoulder can handle a great deal of stress. Gram for gram tendons are stronger than steel cables.[1] People can lift over a thousand pounds without any noticeable damage to the rotator cuff. You might work out at a gym and repeatedly lift hundreds of pounds and never create a tear. How can a person who does no significant physical activity, just driving a car, have tears in the rotator cuff? This is a mystery to solve!

Part of the answer is “blood flow.” Tissues don’t repair with limited blood flow. We use our bodies all day long and “damage” our tissues. Lifting a heavy weight causes tendons or muscle cells to tear, and walking causes our bones to get tiny micro-fractures from stress. Then, every night as we sleep, the body goes into “anabolic mode” which repairs all the damage done during the day. If there is a part of the body that isn’t getting good blood flow, that part will not repair. The next day we do more damage, but the next night it isn’t repaired. The amount of damage done on a daily basis is probably only detectable on a microscopic level. But over time, day in and day out, over years, it can be significant, causing ruptures of tendons in the shoulder, wearing away the cartilage in the hips or knees, or “stress fractures” of the foot and ankle.

The next question in this mystery is why? Why is there limited blood flow? What causes that to happen?

Your entire body controls blood flow every minute.[2] The autonomic nervous system has total control over every inch of your body, except the brain (that’s a fascinating topic for another discussion). This allows increased blood flow to the areas that need more, and scales back blood flow to areas that need less.

Some simple examples that everyone experiences are, for example, when your hands turn white and cold while you play in the snow. The autonomic nervous system is conserving heat for the body, so it turns off blood flow to the hands. When it happens to people who aren’t in the snow, it’s called “Raynaud’s Phenomenon.” This is when a finger will just turn blue, or white because the blood flow is randomly shut off. It can be painful if the blood doesn’t start flowing after a short time. There are even cases of the autonomic nervous system completely turning off the blood long enough to cause necrosis, or cell death, which requires amputation of a finger, or the entire hand![3]

You have experienced the autonomic nervous system when you get embarrassed, and you feel your face getting hot because the blood vessels dilate in your cheeks – that’s an autonomic response to an emotional trigger. Also, if you have felt you’re your heart racing from fear, that’s the autonomic nervous system telling the heart to increase flow to the brain. Sometimes people under stress may have a heart attack or chest pain, called “Prinz metal’s Angina” which is a risk for cardiac death.[4] Blood flow is so important because every cell in the body requires a constant supply of oxygen and nutrients. Without that, no part can survive.

The next level of the mystery is why only specific parts of the body get their blood supply cut off. It seems odd that one part of the body can get limited blood flow while the rest remains perfectly fine. Why do people with Prinzmetal’s Angina get a heart attack from distressing news? Why does the autonomic nervous system limit the blood flow to one shoulder for weeks, months or years, causing rotator cuff injuries? Why does the same thing happen to only one knee, or hip, or just the lower back, causing chronic pain and damage? If my mind, my brain, my consciousness isn’t in control, then what is?

The answers require us to understand what controls the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is partially controlled in the “reptilian brain,” or the emotional brain.[5] We don’t have any direct or conscious control over our blood flow, it’s done automatically, and there is a great deal of input from the emotions. For example, the stress hormones, adrenaline and norepinephrine, cause constriction of blood vessels, but it is mostly the emotional brain, through the parasympathetic nerves, that determines where that constriction happens.

Now, back to Greg. He was curious as to the reason that only the right shoulder was having pain. Since we knew there was emotional input, we went online and looked up some ideas that others have had about emotional causes right shoulder pain. We found several websites that mostly base their ideas on books by Louise Hay.[6] The right side of the body often represents the masculine, or the power, side. Shoulder pain seems to come from unacknowledged loss, or grief. I asked him if that applied to his pain, and his eyes got big. “Loss of power!? Oh my gosh! That is so freaky! Over a year ago I lost my job as a warehouse manager, and I have not been able to find anything since! I am driving for Uber, but that hardly pays the bills, so my wife is supporting the family. That’s exactly what’s happening! What do I do?”

“Get a job!” I quipped.

Emotions are powerful to the body because they control all the things we don’t consciously monitor. I’m so glad I don’t need to think about every breath to control my oxygen, or every heartbeat to control my blood pressure. However, this leaves much of our function in control of our emotions. Like when you get up in front of an audience to speak and wish you could control your racing heart. It would also be nice to be able to control the blood flow to someplace that is lacking, like during a heart attack. There are those who have general control such as yogis in India who sit out in the snow in the Himalayas with only a robe, and the snow around them is all melted. Wim Hof has a program to control the autonomic nervous system. He holds the record for swimming under ice in a Speedo! :/ He also was able to maintain his pressure when given an injection of endotoxin, which usually causes cardiovascular collapse and death.[7]However, this general control does not mean there is specific control to improve blood flow to a joint, muscle, or tissue.

I saw Greg only a couple weeks later and he was ecstatic! He shot his right hand high in the air and exclaimed, “Look! No pain! I can’t believe I lived with it for so long!” Of course, I was curious, so I asked, “What happened?”

“It was amazing! The day after we talked, I ran into Sally, a bookkeeper. She just got a job with an accounting firm, but she had a lot of private clients and didn’t have anyone to take care of them. I know bookkeeping, so I got certified in Quickbooks and took over her clients. Within one week my shoulder pain was completely gone!”

With that testimonial, I started thinking about my own situation. As I was driving home, I recognized my left shoulder still hurt. It had been months. I had to adjust to the pain by changing the way I did things, such as putting my shirts on with the left sleeve first so I could reach behind with the right or using my right hand to take my robe off the hook in the bathroom. Anything that required reaching up or back had to be done with my right hand because my left shoulder hurt too much to do anything above eye level. I started thinking about shoulder pain being caused by “loss, or grief.” Left side represents “feminine, or support.” So, did I have a loss of support, or some feminine loss? I started thinking. I certainly needed support for my business, I had lost my office manager, a woman who moved to Oregon to be with her boyfriend. I continued to think about it. Recently, my last child, my only daughter, went off to college, and I missed her. Hmmm. I was divorced for five years, and that certainly was a loss. I got re-married, but my wife was not able to stay with me in California, so she moved back to her house in Utah, and I was flying there every other weekend to be with her. Most of the time I was alone at home. I felt the pain with that one. That was it! That was a big loss to me! All the other losses were hard, but this was the one I was grieving; this was causing internal anger that I was trying to cover up. So, I had to figure out how to deal with this problem. Either she had to move to California, or I would go to Utah, but neither of these were possible because of logistical problems. During this time, I happened to be reading a book in which there was an off-handed comment that, “No matter how many friends or family we have, we all need to deal with the fact that we are alone.” This struck me. I needed to come to terms with my loneliness. I started going to a psychologist for counseling on the subject, and though I still had a long way to go, my left shoulder pain was gone in a week. I was as amazed as Greg. After suffering for so long, hoping it would just go away, it did, miraculously! I didn’t need surgery, I just needed to acknowledge my emotions.

Other stories I have read, including the research and work of Dr. John Sarno, MD[8], have noted that acknowledging the loss, grief, emotional pain, anger, frustration, rage, weakness, or insecurities is often sufficient to make the pain go away. Dr. Sarno says it’s like your brain is using the pain to tell you that something is wrong that you aren’t aware of, or maybe to distract you from the emotional pain. Once acknowledging the emotion, there is no longer any need to distract you or to tell you something is wrong, so the pain just magically disappears as the blood flow returns to normal by the autonomic nervous system and the tissues repair.

Since then, I have read much about emotions and illness, trying these techniques on many patients, and some have responded. I have seen people with chronic debilitating back pain get off all medications and be pain-free, cancer disappear, cartilage in a knee grow back, Lyme disease cured, and other such miracles. The body has internal mechanisms to heal, and it will, if the way is opened, blood flow restored, and immune function returned. There is a wide variety of illnesses that may be reversed, including:

Cancer
Heart disease
Back, neck, or other pain
Arthritis
Fibromyalgia
Obesity
Diabetes
Fatigue
Sleep issues
High blood pressure

When we have emotional issues, it causes physical problems. These can be treated in a physical way, such as surgery to remove a cancer, or to repair a tendon. We also use biochemistry to treat emotional disease such as drugs for depression, anxiety, hypertension, or chronic pain. Those who have taken opiates for emotional pain find it works, but only for a few hours. This is true with all medications. That blood pressure medication only works for a few hours, then you need another. It’s like an addiction. Going to an “integrative physician” will get you a “deficiency” diagnosis and treatment with supplements that you may work for a time. Going to a chiropractor might relieve it temporarily. Acupuncture may do the same. The point is if you don’t find the root cause first, any treatment may be just temporary.

This is NOT to say that all illness is emotional. If Greg had a skiing accident and damaged the tendons in his rotator cuff, his treatment would certainly have been very different. People also have infections, toxicities, and deficiencies that cause biochemical illness that must be treated with biochemistry. Antibiotics are just as miraculous for infections. Nutrients miraculously cure deficiency diseases. I had a young man with schizophrenia who was cured with vitamin B12 shots. A broken arm needs a splint. It is often a good idea to surgically remove a tumor. There is not one treatment for every illness. That’s why it is so important to look for the root cause of illness before initiating treatment.

The key is to be curious, like Dr. Ryke Hamer, an oncologist in Germany who was “perfectly healthy” when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Though he knew how to treat testicular cancer with chemotherapy, he was curious that this should follow on the heels of the death of his son. After grief counseling, and without any other treatment, his testicular cancer disappeared.[9] To be curious is to ask the question, “could I have some unacknowledged emotion that brings this on?”

There is one more essential issue in this mystery. Why do so many people continue to have pain or illness after they have surgery or medications? Those who have shoulder surgery for a rotator cuff tear don’t heal well and remain in pain if they don’t restore normal blood flow. Likewise, I have known people to have four, five, or even six back surgeries, and still be in pain. In the nursing home I had people with lists of over twenty drugs, and they were still miserable.

When I worked at the emergency department at UCLA there was a ten-year-old boy who came in with a broken arm. The odd thing was that his chart showed a broken bone on the same day each year for the past three years. The first was an ankle in a skateboard accident, the next year he got hit by a bus and broke a rib, and this year he fell out of a tree and broke both his radius and ulna. In questioning his father, we found out the child’s mother had died on that date when he was five years old. Three years later, on that date he had the skateboard accident. How does that happen? Does a nine-year old boy wake up in the morning and say, “today is the anniversary of my mom’s death; I think I’ll step in front of a bus!”? These things are emotional, and not part of our conscious awareness.

Even after repairing a physical or biochemical cause, we still must look for emotions underlying the illness. Many illnesses, infections, injuries, and pain might have underlying emotional causes. Why do some people never catch the flu, or get injured, or have arthritis? We like to look at things outside of our control such as bacteria, viruses, immune function, nutrient deficiencies, or toxicities, but those may be only part of the picture. The immune system is also controlled very specifically by the emotional brain. If the emotions aren’t acknowledged, the pain, illness, or even injuries may persist or recur.

The big question on your mind is the final piece of the mystery: How do I apply this to me? If I have back pain, how am I going to look for underlying emotional causes? This is a big dilemma, because no two people are exactly alike. You must find what fits you. Looking in the resources above might be helpful, but there is no one answer. It is a process. It is searching. Use your curiosity to find the underlying cause.

Don’t be like the doctor and just ask what is happening, instead ask why. Consider the mystery of why your pain came up. I can tell you right now that it wasn’t because you ate the wrong thing, took the wrong pill, walked up too many stairs, sat at a keyboard too long, or moved that heavy dresser. Those may be inciting events, but still are not the underlying cause. I’ve heard those stories thousands of times.

When I had an urgent care, I had many come in for “work injuries” who were not even curious as to why they hated their work.

Be curious. Consider all possibilities. Be brave. Dig deep. Search for answers in every corner.

You may need help from a good therapist or psychologist. Tell them exactly what you are looking for, “I’m curious why my neck started hurting with no injuries!” Sometimes it comes from childhood trauma that you couldn’t control and would rather not remember.

Get help. Solve the mystery.

The amazing connection between the emotions and the body is more riveting than any mystery novel or movie. The greatest mystery of all is your unique story.

Like Greg and me, your curiosity of your own illness just may lead to the discovery of yourself.