Tribute to a medical maverick
“All the Rage ( Saved by Sarno)” is a medical advocacy film, a documentary that attempts to win support for an unorthodox treatment for back pain. Is the movie strong enough to convert skeptics? My crystal ball is cloudy.
The subject is the late Dr. John Sarno ( he died in June), a professor of rehabilitative medicine at NYU Medical School and author of several books, including the bestselling “Healing Back Pain: The Mind- Body Connection” ( 1991).
Sarno’s theory is that, in the words of the film’s narrator, much back pain has its genesis in “repressed emotions from childhood.” It’s a notion that inspired disdain from some in the medical establishment, and for Sarno the feeling was muceases tual. A career- long iconoclast, he says that he never received a single referral from the hundreds of fellow physicians at his hospital.
Here’s how he describes his ideas in the film: “The residual child exists in every one of us. And by putting ourselves under pressure and by the circumstances of life putting us under pressure, that residual child is getting very, very angry, and that literally is the source of this pain.
“Once you are aware of the nature of this, then ( the pain) to exist.”
Despite his professional isolation, Sarno earned the gratitude of many patients, including some celebrities who speak in this movie: Howard Stern, Larry David, John Stossel and former Sen. Tom Harkin. Harkin was so impressed with the doctor’s work that in 2012 he invited him to testify before a senate committee investigating “Pain in America.”
In “All the Rage,” Sarno talks a lot about his ideas and the difficulties he had bucking the medical mainstream. The Sarno supporter who gets the most exposure here is one of the movie’s three makers, Michael Galinsky, who talks extensively about his history of debilitating pain and the relief he found in Sarno’s mind- body notion.
We see footage of Galinsky prostrate from pain, and hear a good deal about his childhood and his relationship to his parents ( including an angry father), an appropriate subject, given the doctor’s emphasis on repressed emotions. Galinsky is eager to share the benefits he says he obtained from Sarno’s treatment — the specifics of which aren’t given in much detail — but to me he wears out his welcome before the end credits roll.
The film was clearly a labor of love, for good or ill. At one point, Galinsky jokingly refers to the production as“semiun professional .” This is unusual and welcome frankness from a moviemaker.