Yesterday we posted a clip of Amy Skinner talking about her experience with CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome). Today I got a google alert about a woman who had doctors cut off her foot because she couldn't stand the pain. While we are working on a film about mind body medicine, we are in no way arguing that...
For a number of reasons, last week was extremely difficult for me. Various stresses, both conscious and unconscious, began to affect my body in a negative way, and by Wednesday night my left foot was bothering me worse than it had in months. For the past 10 years that’s where my stress has gone, down my left leg and...
Eric Sherman Fear from rumur on Vimeo. Dr. Eric Sherman discusses the role that fear plays in pain syndromes I interviewed Ram Dass the other day for "All The Rage". He told me that when he had a stroke, he was resting in the hospital room surrounded by people who were worried, thinking "the stroke was a bad thing". He cleared...
Ants from rumur on Vimeo. A few years ago, I read Jonah Lehrer's article in Wired "Why Science Is Failing Us". It was a lightbulb moment for me as he connected the dots to so many things that I had been thinking but didn't have the words, or data, to pull together. The deepest connection was his illumination...
We have written about the relevance of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris' work a number of times on Rumur. She's the San Francisco-based doctor who realized that a good deal of the time, she was treating the symptoms of stress in her high poverty patients. When she began to practice with an understanding that her patients' stress was a causative factor...
As we work on Story of Pain, we struggle to figure out how best to make use of the flood of amazing and inspirational materials that we are assembling. First and foremost, we want to make a film that tells the story of Dr. John Sarno. This will form the backbone and the heart of the film. In the process of...
On a Saturday afternoon in late September, I almost drowned. On this warm fall afternoon, my friend Caroline and I had impulsively decided to swim across a lake. It’s a big enough body of water that we had to frantically wave at several speedboats to make sure that we didn’t get run over as we crossed. It’s one of those...
whirlpool take 2 from rumur on Vimeo.******* see note below **** I am like my daughter, or she is like me, in that I am less inclined to want to learn how to do things from others. Instead I want to figure it out for myself. Sometimes this is a good thing, because I can develop unique ways of looking...
For years we have been working on a film about the connection between stress and pain. Recently it has expanded to include the connection between stress and overall health. While the film is about the science of healthcare, it’s also about social science - how ideas move through the world - and it’s about framing. When a carpenter looks at...
Pain. We all have our relationships with, and definitions of, pain. There are certain kinds of pain that I don't mind, that I even like a little. The soreness in my muscles from a long run the day before is a reminder of something accomplished. A little bit of emotional pain can lead to cathartic art. However, right now I'm dealing...