Dr. Stracks’s Story: How I Found Healing at a Cocktail Party
On a pleasant spring evening in 1998, I was out minding my own business when I tumbled down a flight of concrete stairs leading to the Chicago River. It was painful and embarrassing, but I bounced up, dusted myself off, and walked on. Over the next several weeks, the bruises healed quickly and the incident faded from my mind. I was still in my twenties, after all, and busy going through a major career change. Several months passed by in their usual fashion.
That autumn, however, I was walking down a hallway at work when my right foot dragged behind me and I fell. I didn’t think much of it, but then it happened again. And again. And again. I began noticing strange sensations in my hands: They felt numb on a regular basis. Other times, they would tingle. I would be typing at work and pain would go shooting into my arms and shoulders. I’d be fine the next day, but then the day after that it would happen again. The frequency of my symptoms increased, and although I assumed things would get better, they didn’t. After several months of suffering—and increasingly odd symptoms in my hands, feet, arms—I concluded that something was physically wrong with me.
I’d never been very ill before. Besides a single bad case of mononucleosis in college, I knew little of physical suffering. I had always been grateful for a body that was healthy and athletic. But suddenly it was constantly malfunctioning, and I didn’t know why. I called my doctor. He wasn't worried, but he invited me in for an appointment anyway, where he concluded that I was totally fine. The only thing was–I didn't feel fine. I was feeling worse. I kept tripping. My hands and feet became more painful. I started to have a hard time walking. When I went back to my physician, he said maybe I had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and referred me to a hand surgeon at a major hospital.
I became seriously worried.
The internet was still in its infancy back then, but it was advanced enough for my purposes. I spent hours poring over websites, trying to find answers. Eventually I decided on my self-diagnosis: Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS). I printed out pages of information, and, armed with my evidence, I made my case to the hand surgeon. He grinned and nodded as I spoke, but said afterward that he believed I was wrong. He didn’t think it was Carpal Tunnel, either. In the end, he suggested an Electromyogram (EMG).
Although I didn’t know it then, I can say with confidence now that an Electromyogram is essentially a medieval torture device masquerading as a diagnostic medical test. For almost an hour, a group of white-coated physicians sent increasingly strong electric shocks into my left arm. They watched with furrowed brows while recording the strength of my muscle spasms. They huddled together to discuss me; I sweated and shivered and tried not to vomit. After it was over, they announced that the test was normal. Also: they wanted to test my right arm. I declined and went home. Much to my surprise, I felt better for a few days.
I bet you can already see where this is going: my feeling better didn’t last. I began tripping again, had trouble walking, began dropping objects left and right, and could hardly feel my fingers. I knew I was deteriorating. I sought a second opinion with no luck. I checked back in with my primary physician. He told me he was sorry, but that he honestly didn’t know what was happening or how to help me.
It seemed that I had run out of options in the conventional medical world. So I turned to the alternative one.
I met with a chiropractor who worked on my neck, an acupuncturist who worked on my arms, and a naprapath who worked on my whole body. I was given herbs by a naturopath. I tried a five-day juice fast, and got three massages in one week to see if that would loosen me up. Each treatment helped for a few days, but still the symptoms came back, each time worse than before. The symptoms began to dominate my entire existence. I thought about them when I woke up, when I was at work, and when I came home. I researched and pondered my research and fretted when I couldn’t figure it all out. I abandoned my normal activities and restricted my social contacts. Eventually I even stopped exercising and going outdoors.
One day I went to a gentle yoga class to see if they could help. In order to do a simple backbend, I needed two people for support. Bending back in pain, I thought to myself, “Less than ten years ago I was a varsity college athlete. What the &@#% am I doing here?” But there I was.
It had been almost a year since I first tripped down the stairs near the river, but I hadn’t gotten any better. My daily life had been completely upturned. I had no idea what was going to happen next and not only was I out of options, I was out of hope.
And then suddenly, that changed. I saw a glimmer of light. At a cocktail party, of all places.
I had been invited to a benefit dinner by a friend who was on the board of a not-for-profit. Another friend of mine named Dany had been invited as well, and when I saw him, the first thing I noticed was that he was standing crooked. It turned out Dany had thrown his back out playing basketball the day before. We commiserated together.
Later in the evening, Dany and I were talking to a third friend, Rich, who looked at Dany and said, “You know, I used to have back problems, but I don’t anymore.” We gave him a look and he continued: “I remember the night I was hanging upside-down in my basement from my antigravity boots, trying to stretch out my spine, and thinking, this just can’t be right. So I did some research and found a book by a physician named John Sarno who believes back pain is misplaced stress and emotion. It made sense to me, so I called his office for an appointment.
“At that point, Dr. Sarno was only taking patients from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, so I lied and said I was from New Jersey. I flew out to New York and he met with me, examined me, told me I didn’t have a structural back issue, and told me to come that evening for a lecture. I sat through his two-hour lecture, and by the end of that evening, I knew—absolutely knew—that there was nothing wrong with my back. I was just stressed out, and my stress was showing itself in this physical way. I’ve never had a back problem since.”
Dany was excited and said he planned to go home and read Dr. Sarno’s book. I was quiet, however, because I was thinking, “Wait, I’ve read that book before.”
I’ll take a brief step back here. As I mentioned earlier, I was in the midst of a major career change as all this was happening.
After graduating from college, I took a job as a youth worker. A few years later, I shifted positions into a child welfare job, working with teenage state wards who were learning to live on their own before being emancipated from state care. My job was to teach them how to keep an apartment, retain a job, and finish their education. After four years of doing that work, it became clear to me that I needed to create a different path for my life.
I considered obtaining several other degrees, but ultimately decided they weren’t great fits.
For years I’d had a nagging sensation that maybe I’d be interested in going to medical school, but I hadn’t taken any science classes in college, and as far as I knew, I was afraid of blood. Eventually I took a leap of faith and signed up for a physiology class and a biology class. The next year I left my social work job and worked in a health clinic for nine months. During my time there, I realized that blood didn’t bother me. I took some more classes. I found a research job at the University of Chicago and was just starting there when I fell down those stairs that spring day.
During my studies I had become interested in integrative medicine. I began doing yoga and changed my diet, among other things. By the time of my illness, I had looked into acupuncture school, chiropractic school, naturopathic school, and naprapathic school. Even though I had decided to go down a conventional medicine track, I was still intrigued by all those alternative approaches.
Somewhere along my journey into the alternative medical world, I had read Dr. Sarno’s book The Mindbody Prescription. In it, he explains how the hard circumstances of our lives can be expressed in our bodies in the form of pain—often through back pain, but also through migraine headaches, neck pain, stomach issues, joint pain, and other symptoms. He recommends journaling about stressors and teaching your brain to control your emotions. The Mindbody Prescription is a widely read book, with thousands upon thousands of people who have read it over the years and healed.
On the night of the cocktail party, as I listened to Rich’s story and watched Dany’s reaction, it occurred to me for the first time that maybe I wasn’t actually sick. Maybe I was seriously stressed, and maybe my body was expressing that stress in physical ways.
And I did have some things to be stressed about. Three big things, in fact. The first was my career change. I had made the decision to push ahead and try to get into medical school. I had tons and tons of studying ahead.
I was also falling in love with my now-wife Lisa. Which was—obviously—a wonderful thing. But we were facing the decision to get married, and these days I tell younger patients in my practice that the most common reason for chronic symptoms in young men is a change in relationship status or a change in parenting status. Even the best of all the big life changes can cause extreme stress.
And last of all, I was struggling with my faith. My wife is a Christian, as I am now. But back then, I was still trying to figure out where I stood. The weight of that uncertainty turned out to be a lot to bear.
It turned out that all three of those huge life changes at once were more than my psyche could handle. In turn, my body took over and held the stress there for me. In retrospect, it was actually kind of my body to take attention away from those stressors, but I didn’t come close to recognizing that at the time. For an entire year, I thought my body was betraying me. Today, I know better; my body was trying to help me deal with my ever-evolving life, to protect me from discomfort.
So on that spring evening in 1999, around a year after my first fall, I went home after the party and dug out my copy of The Mindbody Prescription. Reading it caused everything to become clear: I didn’t have nerve issues or muscle issues or a chronic disease. I was a twenty-eight-year old young man who was encountering life changes that were beyond my ability to deal with, and my body was expressing that struggle. I realized, for the first time in a whole year, that I might ultimately be okay.
I woke up the next morning hopeful but without any physical changes for the better. I went to work, struggled through the day, and came home that evening, a little deflated but resolute in my convictions. An idea came to my mind. I went down into my basement, dusted off my bicycle, and went out for a ride.
I hadn’t ridden my bike in almost a year due to the pain and the fear. But I was determined and inspired after rereading that book. I went out. I rode the mile down city streets to Chicago’s Lake Michigan bike path and then turned north, toward downtown Chicago. As I accelerated, the pain in my feet was searing, but with each pedal stroke I told myself, “This is not a physical issue. This is not a physical issue.” Things began to get worse. Each pedal stroke was a knife into my foot, and the pain radiated up my legs and into my shoulders. I fought with myself, with the part of my brain that urged me to turn around and go home. I couldn’t believe how badly I was hurting, and I struggled to remember why I was biking in the first place.
Somehow I managed to keep going. I remembered my mantra: “This is not a physical issue. This is not a physical issue.” Finally, about three miles into the ride, the pain began to calm down. I made it all the way downtown, and the pain continued to lessen. I began to feel much better. By the time I made it home, the pain was about 20% of what it had been when I started the ride. I had successfully flooded my system with anxiety and pain to its breaking point—the point at which my body couldn’t hold those things anymore. When I arrived home, I was ecstatic.
For a long time afterward, whenever I told this story, I finished with my triumphant return from the ride, saying: “I was better. End of story.” A few years later, however, I was preparing to give a talk on this subject when I came across the journal I kept in the aftermath of that day. I looked at the entries and realized that for weeks and weeks afterward, I continued to stress and worry and suffer. The symptoms were better some days, worse on others. I was concerned that no physician had confirmed this Mind-Body diagnosis for me, and on bad days my confidence wavered.
But then those journal entries also started to space out a few days. As the weeks went by, there were fewer doubts and fewer reports of significant symptoms. The tone of the entries was calmer, and I became more certain. Overall, there were about six weeks of regular entries, then a six-week pause, then one more entry and nothing more. I really was better.
I make sure to remind my patients now that the journey to wellness is a process.
That was over two decades ago now. I’ve since ridden my bike thousands of miles and have completed four century rides (clocking 100 miles in a day). I’ve run, played tennis and golf, done yoga, and played with my children. I don’t shy away from physical challenges. I never, ever get headaches. I rarely throw my back out and when I do, it gets better in a few days. In short, I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about my physical being anymore.
In 2001, a few years into feeling better, I started medical school with the knowledge I learned from that episode: which is that chronic physical symptoms can have psychological roots. I figured that I would tell everyone, that people would get better, and that everyone would be happy. If only it were so simple.
The first time I interviewed a real patient, in early 2003, the patient was in the emergency room with acute onset back pain. I had made myself a vow when I started school to always ask patients in pain whether or not there was anything stressful going on in their lives. When I asked her, the patient said she thought she would be fired from work the next day. Her symptoms then made perfect sense to me—she was experiencing so much stress!—so I advised her on what I knew and she nodded politely. Thinking it was going to be a short encounter and that she would head home, grateful, I told my attending physician what I had learned. He looked at me like I had two green heads. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Did you order an MRI, or did you not order an MRI?” I realized it was not going to be so easy to share what I knew to be true about chronic pain.
So I made a second vow, which is that I would learn everything I could about the connection between mind and body and how it relates to healing chronic symptoms. There are over a hundred million Americans in chronic pain, and they—and you—need lasting solutions that go beyond medication.
My practice and this blog are the product of what I’ve learned in the intervening decades since I sat with my first patient. This is my contribution to the solution for the chronic pain epidemic in America that costs us billions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives each year.
Periodically, after my patients become well, they tell me that they’re grateful for their symptoms, because their process for healing grew them in ways they had never imagined. When I hear them say that, I smile and nod knowingly. I believe with all of my heart—and all of my body—that I went through those nine months of suffering so that I could learn the truth. Namely, that our bodies have the ability to express, via pain and other symptoms, the difficult things that cannot be expressed in any other way. I am glad for my story, because it has allowed me to do what I always wanted to do: to help others, so that they can heal and move forward with their lives in the same way I moved forward with mine.
Are you interested in starting your healing journey? We are here for you. Visit Cormendi Health to learn more and schedule your appointment with Dr. Stracks.