WHY SO MANY NAMES?
Medicine tends to name what it can measure. When a symptom can’t be traced to visible tissue damage or a clear pathogen, it often gets bundled into a diagnosis based on the pattern of symptoms rather than the cause. That’s how we end up with dozens of labels for pain syndromes, chronic fatigue syndrome, and separate diagnostic categories for fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pelvic pain, tension headaches, back pain and long Covid, even though there is enormous overlap between them and, for many people, a shared root in a dysregulated nervous system.
The mindbody field has grown in layers, and each layer added its own vocabulary. Understanding the layers helps make sense of all these names and letters.
PEOPLE ASK ME THIS ALL THE TIME
“Do you do PRT?” “Are you a somatic practitioner?” “Is this the Sarno method?”
My honest answer is always yes, and yes, and yes. Behind every one of these questions is a person who just wants to know they’re in the right place. This article is here to help you see what each of these terms actually mean, where they came from, why there are so many of them, and where my own approach sits.
An introduction to the Letters
🌿 TMS – The Mindbody Syndrome (also known as Tension Myoneural Syndrome or Tension Myositis Syndrome)
This is where it all started for me, and for so many people in this field. Dr John Sarno, a physician at New York University, spent decades working with patients whose back pain had no structural explanation that matched their level of disability. His discovery was that the nervous system itself can generate real, physical pain as a learned protective response, long after any original injury has healed. Not imagined pain. Not “in your head” in the dismissive sense. Actual pain, generated by real neurological processes.
Whether or not you take that psychodynamic explanation exactly as he framed it, his central insight, that chronic pain and chronic symptoms can be generated and maintained by the brain rather than by ongoing tissue damage, opened the door that everyone since has walked through, including me.
💛 PRT – Pain Reprocessing Therapy
PRT is one of the more recent evolutions of that same insight. Alan Gordon, a psychotherapist who himself recovered from chronic pain using Sarno’s ideas, built Pain Reprocessing Therapy into a structured method for recovery. It starts with education, understanding the neuroscience of chronic pain and how the brain can generate pain signals in the absence of tissue damage, followed by gathering personalised evidence that the pain is centralised rather than structural.
From there, it’s about breaking the pain-fear cycle and safety reappraisal, then working through the wider factors, patterns and behaviours that keep the nervous system on high alert. A central tool here is somatic healing, often beginning with somatic tracking, a guided practice using mindfulness as a way to work with the pain or symptoms.
You can try this practice for yourself here if you would like to: Somatic Tracking Exercise.
🌸 MBS – Mind-Body Syndrome (and Neuroplastic Pain)
This is the term used by Dr Howard Schubiner, who was a student of Dr. Sarno. He has continued to map the mind-body field since Sarno’s original work, extending far beyond back pain into anxiety, gut symptoms, migraines, chronic fatigue, and the whole constellation of conditions that don’t show up cleanly on a scan but are entirely real in the body.
Dr Schubiner’s contribution has been to bring more compassion to this work, helping people distinguish between structural and neuroplastic causes of symptoms, and developing clearer diagnostic thinking around what he and colleagues sometimes call neuroplastic pain. MBS sits alongside PRT and TMS, simply reflecting how wide this territory really goes. You may also come across the term PPD, which points to the same territory from a slightly different angle.
🌿 PPD – Psychophysiological Disorder
This is the term coined by Dr David Clarke, whose organisation has been training clinicians under this name for years before recently renaming itself the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms, or ATNS (which I’m registered with). PPD and neuroplastic symptoms mean the same thing as the above classifications; real physical pain and symptoms generated by the nervous system’s response to stress, and Dr Clarke’s framework has been very influential, mapping symptoms from digestive health to dizziness to chronic pain in the body.
Amari's Perspective
I’ve spent the last six years training and studying in this field, first for my own recovery, then to help others. I still have the textbook a doctor gave me years ago. It’s dog-eared now, but I’ve kept it. On one page there’s a list of every name chronic fatigue syndrome has ever been called. Burnout. Post-viral fatigue syndrome. Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. ME/CFS. Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease. The list goes on, so many labels for the same exhausted body.
The only one missing from that page was TMS – The Mindbody Syndrome. The one that doesn’t just cover fatigue, but also pain, anxiety, gut health, sleep issues, and so much more besides… the one that points to a root cause and therefore the possibility of recovery.
Once I started training in this field, I found the same pattern everywhere: Every clinician, every researcher, every school of thought seems to have coined its own term for what is often the same discovery: that the nervous system and brain can generate very real physical symptoms once it has learned to. (The ones named on this page are just a few of the current labels).
So I try to keep things simple. I always call it The Mind-Body Syndrome (TMS), sticking with those first letters, and working in a personalised way with each client, as you are unique.
Next Steps for You
Explore the Mind-Body Healing Approach: it includes a description of the whole healing journey so you can get a sense of how you will be guided to understand the neuroscientific principles, rewire your brain, release fear as you create safety, and recover your health and happiness.
With warmth and care,
Amari 
