Customer Reviews

Fibromyalgia and the MindBodySpirit Connection: 7 Steps for Living a Healthy Life with Widespread Muscular Pain and Fatigue (Mind-Body-Spirit Connection Series)

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I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 1994 and have read everything available on the subject. I have had excellent medical care, tried alternative therapies, meditated, relaxed, prayed with faith, exercised, used vitamins, herbs, etc.etc.etc. I still live with daily pain and fatigue!! I didn't learn anything new from this book. I found its simplistic, repetitive style and subtly condescending tone to be unhelpful at best, and extremely discouraging at worst. I found the ephemeral "mindbodyspirit" connection to amount to a fancy way of saying "it's all in your head". The last thing fibromyalgics need is unsympathetic MDs telling us we can "cure ourselves"!!I'd like to see them walk a mile in our shoes. Try the book Fibromyalgia and Chronic Myofascial Pain Syndrome by Dr. Devin Starlanyl for a comprehensive understanding of fibromyalgia by a compassionate physician.

As a fellow FM sufferer, I was very please with the book. I have read other books by Dr. Salt and was intrigued when I came across this book on amazon. I ordered it at once and devoured it in only a few days time. I run a support group in our community and am anxious to explore any new ideas for our group and to recommend reading materials to those in need. I truly recommend this book to anyone who is suffering with fibromyalgia. Thank you Dr. Salt for your dedication and support of those of us who had nowhere else to turn. I found the book very informative and helpful and have recommended it to my group. Please keep up the good work!

I have had fibromyalgia for about three years. I went to several doctors and a couple of emergency rooms before I got help. My physcian recommended this book to help me deal with the anguish of this troublesome condition. This book has given me a goul to obtain. It gives a person ways to help the condition as well as abtain a helpful daily regiment to good health. Before reading this book, I did not know how many factors there are in maintaining good health. This book is broken down into chapters that are short and easy to read, also the book is uplifting and positive.

Fibromyalgia is the most common cause of generalized musculoskeletal pain in women between the ages of 20 and 55, and affects more than two percent of the United States population. William Salt and Edwin Season are medical doctors who draw upon their many years of practice to outline "7 Steps for Living a Healthy Life with Widespread Muscular Pain and Fatigue", and to explain the impact of psychological and spiritual well-being for Fibromyalgia sufferers. Drs. Salt and Season show how to live with this condition, rather than suffer from it. Fibromyalgia and the MindBodySpirt Connection is written for the lay reader, and to help Fibromyalgia patients to better understand the core of their condition and take positive steps to reverse those factors that are within their control. Highly recommended for personal, public, and professional medical reference library collections.

I feel I have wasted good money on this one. I am a strong believer in mind-body medicine, but the bits and pieces of boring information in primer form were a real turn off.

The information in this book seems to have been copied almost straight from other sources.

Try Jon Kabat-Zinn, Deepak Chopra, Emmet E. Miller, J. Sarno, Candace Pert, almost anybody else, for more inspiring reading.

While looking at this book it became reality to me that the MindBodySpirit connection is actually lost in it's content. It becomes a Mind experience with many different antidepressant issues involved. There are treatments that I have experienced in this book that are supposed to help that do nothing but further frustrate the complex problems of Fibromyalgia. Also, the guaifenesen treatment may have no reason to work, and it may only show as a placebo effect in certain people during testing, but for those of us who try it and find that it does something to us that nothing in the past has even begun to do it is a life saver. Chronic Fatigue is a giant issue with this illness and guaifenesin treatment has helped me so much in this area that I would never give it up. I also see that there are MindBodySpirit issues with the illness of fibromyalgia, depression coming and going at will and especially during stress related situations, but it is something way too complex to even begin to work out in this book given the minute amount of space alloted each topic.
I too feel it was a waste of time and money for me. I didn't find much out in it except to "take a pill". Believe me...I've done that a lot over the past 18 years! What works for one person may never work for the next! hopefully the next person down the road will find a beginning to healing in it if they happen to buy it.

MindBodySpirit can be written all together like it's one word. Now you know what this book is about.

If you really want to connect your mind, body, and spirit, try a yoga class. If you want to know how your mind (nervous system and emotions) and body are connected, try some other book. I would recommend The Fibromyalgia Help Book (Fransen & Russell) or Inside Fibromyalgia (Pellegrino).

I am 43 years old and I have Fibromyalgia. This book has challenged me to look at what my body and mind need to nourish my spirit. This book can help anyone who is accustomed to stress in everyday life. It will benefit anyone, not just those who have Fibromyalgia. I have bought three copys of this book; one was for myself and the other two were for gifts to people I love.

This book, while telling some of the truth about fibromyalgia, was co-written by Edwin Season, who works as an "independent medical examiner" for the Ohio State Teacher Retirement System. That means it is his job to find reasons to deny disability to those who need it, thereby saving the retirement system money. (This retirement system is being investigated for misuse of funds.) I am one of their victims, my illness being labeled as "Somatization Disorder" despite the mounds of objective medical evidence of brain injury, etc. I provided. Thanks to Season, I now struggle to work just 20 hours per week and I cannot keep up on bills. All because he thinks that illnesses like Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are all in the mind. He needs to look at the evidence - and, a little compassion wouldn't hurt either. I'm now destroyed financially with little means of support. Thanks for nothing, Season.

My doctor recommended that I read this book after she gave me a tentative diagnosis of FBS last week. I am utterly shocked that a doctor would recommend this. Not only is it dated (ten years old), but it not-so-subtly evangelizes you, with a photo of a cross in the initial chapters and the backing of a Lutheran pastor on the back. Now, before you label me as an anti-Christian pinko Commie, I have a Masters from the Lutheran seminary that is across the street from the parish from whence this pastor had been. I still found its veiled pro-God talk being placed in the first chapter of the book instead of a later chapter, as well as the use of the word "God," which excludes Buddhism, in poor taste.

The book tells you that the pain doesn't actually exist: you are simply telling your body that it hurts. If you simply figure out how to tell your body to stop feeling the phantom pain with no real origin, then you will be cured! Here is a quote: "Suppose you believe that you originally hurt your back while lifting. You can experience fear and anxiety -- even panic --if you believe that you have a bad back and are called upon to life something again. . . (24-25)"

They claim to want to dispel the misconception that fibromyalgia is a mental disorder, yet all the information they give -- surround by child-like drawings about neuropeptides and "illnesses without a disease" cartoons -- says exactly this.

No, doctors, I know very well that when I got hit by a bus, that my back hurt. I also know that when I was weight lifting, I had injured my knees, my back, and I know at some point I strained my pelvic area. I am not merely sending psychosomatic phantoms through my body.

I am not saying that this book is completely inaccurate. There indeed is a relationship between the mind, emotions, and the body. I also know that stress, depression, PTSD, and other traumas can manifest in how the body handles pain, or how easily it is injured. But this book offensively says that it is actually all in your head, and one great tool for getting rid of the pain is to believe in God and to pray (not merely meditate and develop a spiritual life, which I agree is very useful in balancing the body-mind axis). They even recommend that I read a book by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement!