Enlightening. Hope.

Will report back on the efficacy if the boy decides to pursue the treatment. ( )

In a society where the doctor spends eight minutes max with the patient and finds out nothing about the person (as opposed to the symptoms), A Headache In The Pelvis is a refreshing antidote. Wise and Anderson populate their book (“The Definitive”) with every conceivable aspect of pelvic pain conditions, including, if not especially, the roles of stress, belief, expectations and confidence. They are honest about the placebo effect, and that there is no drug that will work well for very long in these cases. Nor will surgery. Most doctors only treat the symptoms. This is that horrific reductionist model in which doctors see their role as narrowing the problem to a single point and treating that point like it was car repair. More and more, it works less and less, and Drs. Wise and Anderson acknowledge that explicitly.

The book is a step by step exposure of all thinking behind what they do for pelvic pain patients, as well as a step by step explanation of every phase of their process. It empowers the patient enormously. There is no mystery left. No magic, drugs no just- trust-your-doctor. The patient learns exactly what is being done, how, and why. Because Wise and Anderson want patients to perform all the procedures themselves. We need a book like this for everything in medicine.

There are two large components to the process: touch and relaxation. Touch involves letting the affected muscles know that you acknowledge their distress. These are mostly the more obscure, tiny muscles in the trunk, many inside the anus. Relaxation is essentially meditation, allowing tension and stress to continue, while ignoring them for a more blank moment of bliss. Altogether, the doctors recommend two to four hours a day of this, for life. That’s the most difficult part.

This just has to be absolutely everything there is to know about pelvic pain and the conditions it produces elsewhere. It is discouraging that so much of the “cure” is mental. A good hundred pages are devoted to attitude and acceptance. Because most of pelvic pain comes from stress. And the good doctors are very up front about it: “The experience of release of tension and anxiety afforded by a placebo is not different from the experience of release that is the focus of our treatment. “

And if anybody knows, they do.

David Wineberg ( )