Jimmy Kimmel reveals celebrity secret to healing back pain

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel is giving some earnest advice for the AARP crowd: how to resolve excruciating back pain.

The 55-year-old “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host revealed in an interview with WSJ. Magazine that he’s been digging into the book “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection,” by John E. Sarno, aimed at helping folks overcome their back conditions sans drugs, surgery, exercise or even physical therapy with a mind-over-matter approach. 

“It tells you in detail that a lot of the pain you experience is generated by the brain to distract you from anger, stress, psychological trauma you haven’t dealt with,” Kimmel said, noting that he feverishly marked up the book’s pages.

“I read it in detail — I took notes and highlighted things — and I’ll be damned if my back pain hasn’t gone away.”

Brooklyn-born Kimmel, who will host the 2023 Oscars on Sunday, got the tip from fellow funnyman Howard Stern, who has been talking about the book for years.

Sarno, a former professor of rehabilitation medicine at New York University School of Medicine, published his book in 1991. Soon, Stern and Larry David were singing his praises, with the latter calling his recovery “the closest thing that I’ve ever had in my life to a religious experience.”

According to Sarno’s book, chronic pain can be the result of repressed emotions. Feelings of anxiety, anger and other stressors can trigger the body to decrease blood flow to the nerves and muscles, resulting in pain in the neck, shoulders, back or butt. He argued that this chronic pain could be alleviated by addressing the brain’s role via psychotherapy and journaling.

Sarno also coined the term tension myositis syndrome to describe a chronic-pain condition with unexplained, non-medical causes that has psychological underpinnings. In his book, he illustrates how many of his patients — the majority of whom are successful in their careers — have found relief without drugs or surgery.

“In reality, the most important reason statistically for pain people have is what’s going on in their lives. Knowledge is the only prescription that I have that I give to patients,” Sarno, who died in 2017, said in a testimonial interview featuring patients Stern and David.

“I had something called frozen shoulder,” Stern said in the same interview. “I couldn’t raise my hand higher than this,” barely lifting his arm above his shoulder.

“I was in such pain, and, of course, after I saw Dr. Sarno, in a period of time, it was completely gone. I said, ‘Oh my God. These guys, these ghouls, would have cut me up.’ The fact that the medical community is resisting this is insanity.”  

David also said he believed he had a herniated disc — until he saw Sarno. 

“All of the sudden I could feel my whole body straightening out. I’m hearing cracks in my neck. All of the sudden the pain is gone. It was the closest thing that I’ve ever had in my life to a religious experience, and I wept,” he said.

A 2019 study by German researchers found that approximately 85% of back pain has no specific cause.

According to a New York Times report about Sarno’s work, his focus on the mind-body connection was astute — though nowadays, scientists are focused on the nervous system and not blood flow, and identifying biological and social factors in addition to psychological ones.

New successful modes of treatment include emotional awareness and expression theory, in which patients “identify and express emotions they’ve been avoiding,” according to the Times.

But while Sarno was a proponent of exercise, Kimmel told WSJ. he’s been doing “nothing” in that department.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about playing pickleball, which I’ve never done,” Kimmel said. “Right now, exercise is zero.”