Pain Free : A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain

by Pete Egoscue and Roger Gittines

Book Overview

Starting today, you don't have to live in pain.That is the revolutionary message of this breakthrough system for eliminating chronic pain without drugs, surgery, or expensive physical therapy. Developed by Pete Egoscue, a nationally renowned physiologist and sports injury consultant to some of today's top athletes, the Egoscue Method has an astounding 95 percent success rate. The key is a series of gentle exercises and carefully constructed stretches...

Customer Reviews

Great informative book

The book "Pain Free', is highly recommended if you want to resolve body joint/muscle pain, without surgery.

Good book, advice is quite spread out

I found pretty immediate relief for my back/hip/knee pain after two long sessions. I didn't believe it myself. I was able to tie my shoe standing up, a minor miracle as I've not been able to do this for about three years since an injury. I've basically spend 25 years at a desk and have suffered many of the described symptoms. I fell 3 years ago and hurt my lower back. The exercises in this book have provided much needed relief. I fully understand you have to keep doing the sessions. This is EXACTLY as you would with many other therapies, such as chiropractic, Chi Kung, Yoga and Codeine. As he points out in the first three chapters, surgery is not necessarily a permanent fix either, and doesn't address the basic problem. I only hope I can make time in my routine to do this regularly. As others have said, each session can be long This is not a '6 minutes to pain free back' book. This is NOT a criticism of the book, just a realistic observation. However, if you have spent hours each day suffering from pain or scarfing down pain medication, perhaps it's time to look within and find the time for self improvement. The only complaints I have with the book itself is that you often need to read it with a bunch of bookmarks and flip back and forth. The book is organized into chapters, one for each section of the body. Many of the exercises are repeated in several sections, but the complete directions for the repeated exercises appear only once. Therefore, when you are laying on your back, book open, trying to figure out where to put your right leg next, you need to turn to page 72, then 128, then 47. This is an unfortunate organization because the PICTURES of the posture appear in the text as needed, but the TEXT instructions appear only once. Repeating this information would NOT have added much more than 10 pages to the book and would have been well worth it. The flip side of this complaint is that the exercises, once learned, are fairly easy to do and you really wouldn't need the book in hand every session. I'd rate the advice as good, but the book needs a new edition that describes each repeated exercise fully. A big plus would be a spiral binding or some binding that allows the book to lay completely flat.

Scientific Perspective on the Body

I'll add my voice to the others extolling the virtues of the Egoscue Method. What really impressed me, as an engineer and scientist, was Pete's recognition that the body must obey structural laws, just like a skyscraper. Buildings are designed so that weight is transferred through the girders, not the joints. In people, muscles position our girders (bones) so that they transfer weight effectively. When our muscles weaken from lack of use, the bones aren't positioned correctly. Our personal skyscraper begins to sway, and the wrong joints or muscles are forced to compensate. This causes or allows the myriad of ailments Pete describes, because the wrong joints simply cant bear the load -- knees wear out, backs hurt, etc. Don't think this program is easy. You must pay attention to detail when you do the exercises. It is hard, long work. Muscles that have weakened for years dont strengthen overnight. But feeling good, controlling your own health -- isn't that worth it? After five orthopedists and two chiropracters, it is for me.

This book relieved hip, knee, and shoulder pain for me.

I must add my endorsement to those of others. Last summer, after two back operations, and hundreds of hours of physical therapy, and facing the prospect of beginning school in chronic pain that required me to lie down for several hours a day, I saw Mr. Egoscue's book. I tried the exercises, doing them exactly as he instructs. Within a few weeks, I noticed significant improvement, and not only in my back, but in chronic knee and shoulder problems. I kept up with the exercises, and, after about six months, I found I could do things I hadn 't been able to do for over ten years--like swim, lift weights, ride a bike. . . I'm not completely pain-free, but I credit the exercises in this book for returning me to about 80% normal. I continue to do the maintenance exercises daily. I'm completely convinced by Mr. Egoscue, and this is after trying conventional medicine and every alternative in the books and quite a few not in the books. His approach works far more effectively than anything else I've tried, from surgery to herbs. I recommended it to a friend who called me one morning in severe back pain--two weeks later she, too, was calling it a miracle. I'm in danger of becoming a bore at parties, because whenever I hear anyone with any kind of chronic musculoskeletal problem I spend about half an hour extolling the virtues of Mr. Egoscue's method. It works!

Buy this book *BEFORE* you need it.

I'm going to have to lower my lathe about 4 inches. Hmm, well that's starting at the end. Back to the beginning: The first thing I noticed when I got the book was a blurb from Depak Chopra. Not very encouraging. The second was on about page 34 or so the author says the X-Rays are one of the biggest problems with modern medicine...and I'm an X-Ray Tech. The biggest problem is that all of the evidence is anecdotal, some even celebrity anecdotes, nary a controlled study in sight. But I'm afraid I've become an anecdote myself. After doing the shoulder pain exercises for a couple of weeks, not only has the pain gone away but my shoulder height has dropped about four inches. I can tell, because both of my lathes were set to be at elbow height, and now they're far too high.After doing the shoulder exercises for a month or so I switched over to the general exercises, and my feet, after 50 years, now point straight ahead when I walk instead of out to the sides. With a little deliberate effort at first, mind you.The book makes consumate sense. And it sure worked for me. Far better to buy and follow the book now before our modern propensity for the sedentary life gets you in trouble.