Back pain is no stranger to most of us. However there are some people that experience back pain on a daily basis. Doctors prescribe medication and exercise but nothing seems to work. Sometimes the cause of the pain can be identified and yet there is no relief for the individual. Doctors have found, the same illness in two different people works differently for each person. One of the reasons is psychological and the other is physiological. Doctors found most back pain is accompanied by other illnesses of the back. Sometimes the phantom illnesses are undetectable. Sometimes they are not found until surgery is performed for a different ailment of the back. A person with a degenerative disc may also have scoliosis. The person may have spinal arthritis but the original treatment was for low back pain.

A well known neurologists performed an experiment on a group of patients that had the same illness. He pretended to perform surgery on each of the patients. In reality, he only  performed the surgery on half the patients. On  half the group he made incisions on where the entry would have been for the actual surgery. He documented all his work. He observed the two groups of patients. Both groups recovered and regained access to the injured areas at the same rate. They both regained full use of the areas in which the surgery was performed. Two years later, the patients that received the fake surgery were told of the doctor's experiment. To their surprise, they were happy to know they were well and they did not have the surgery after all. The message from this experiment, the psychological aspects of an injury is just as strong as the actual injury. They thought they were healed so they told themselves they were healed. They acted on that knowledge. This was a psychological healing of the illness.