Chronic back pain has a way of reshaping daily life, often quietly and relentlessly. Uprise steps into this space with a message that feels both challenging and hopeful. Dr. Sean M. Wheeler asks readers to pause, reconsider long-held beliefs, and explore a new way of understanding pain and healing.
Opening Thoughts on a Persistent Problem
Lower back pain remains one of the most common reasons people seek medical care. Despite decades of innovation, many patients cycle through treatments without lasting relief. Uprise begins by addressing this uncomfortable reality head-on. Dr. Wheeler suggests that progress has stalled because the foundational assumptions guiding treatment have gone unquestioned.
Rather than focusing solely on structures seen on scans or isolated symptoms, the book invites a deeper look at how pain changes the body over time. When the back hurts, certain muscles unique to humans lose strength and coordination. These muscles support posture, balance, and spinal control, yet they often receive little direct attention during standard care. As weakness grows, instability follows, movement becomes guarded, and pain returns.
Dr. Wheeler presents these ideas with clarity and calm confidence. His writing feels conversational, shaped by years of listening to patients describe frustration, confusion, and fatigue. The message remains consistent throughout. If outcomes remain poor, it signals a need for a new framework rather than more of the same.
First Impressions of the Body Guitar Theory
At the heart of Uprise lies the Body Guitar Theory, a concept that reshapes how readers view their own bodies. Dr. Wheeler compares the human body to a musical instrument. Each muscle, joint, and movement pattern acts like a string that must remain properly tuned. When even one string drifts out of alignment, the entire instrument sounds off.
This metaphor offers immediate clarity. Pain, in this view, reflects imbalance rather than isolated damage. Chronic discomfort emerges when the body compensates for weakness and instability instead of functioning as a coordinated whole. Traditional treatments may reduce symptoms temporarily, yet the underlying discord remains.
The second edition of Uprise expands this idea through the introduction of “Tune Me,” described as a new medical orchestration for restoring balance. This approach emphasizes purposeful muscle engagement, controlled mobility, and awareness of how the body moves through space. Healing becomes an active process guided by understanding rather than guesswork.
Readers may find this perspective refreshing. The theory respects the body’s design and adaptability while acknowledging how easily it can fall out of sync under pain and stress.
Experience That Shapes the Message
Dr. Sean M. Wheeler’s professional journey adds weight to the ideas presented in Uprise. His career spans more than four decades and bridges multiple disciplines, including family medicine, sports medicine, pain management, and surgical care. This range allows him to view musculoskeletal pain from angles many clinicians never combine.
Before medicine, Dr. Wheeler competed as an NCAA football player at Texas Christian University and Kansas State University. He later earned his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine and completed residency and fellowships at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. His training included time with Dr. James R. Andrews, a widely respected orthopedic surgeon known for treating elite athletes.
Among the first physicians board-certified in both Sports Medicine and Pain Management, Dr. Wheeler holds four board certifications. He has served as a team physician for collegiate athletic programs across the NCAA, NAIA, and NJCAA. These experiences sharpened his observational skills and deepened his respect for how movement, strength, and recovery intersect.
Throughout Uprise, his background shows through careful explanations and an ego-less approach to care. The focus stays on what helps patients regain control of their bodies and their lives.
Why It Matters for Readers Today
Uprise resonates because it addresses a widespread problem with sincerity and originality. The book does not promise quick fixes or universal answers. Instead, it offers a way to understand why pain persists and how the body responds when key systems fall out of alignment.
The recognition of the first edition as Publisher Weekly’s National Book of the Week reflects its impact. This updated edition builds upon that foundation with refined insights and a clearer roadmap for change. Readers gain language to describe their experiences and concepts that encourage more informed conversations with healthcare providers.
Uprise ultimately reframes chronic back pain as a signal rather than a sentence. By viewing the body as an instrument capable of retuning, Dr. Wheeler opens space for progress grounded in awareness, precision, and respect for human design. For anyone searching for a deeper explanation and a more hopeful direction, this book offers a compelling place to begin.
We had the privilege of interviewing the author. Here are excerpts from the interview:
Thank you so much for joining us today! Why did you decide to write Uprise, a book about chronic pain and the interplay between pain, spinal instability, and muscle weakness?
Uprise was actually written out of frustration. I care deeply about the patients I treat. I feel that all of us do our part in this world. No one has all the gifts, all the answers, or all the skills, and therefore, we need each other. In doing my part, it fills my cup to take care of people and figure out their complex problems. With back pain, the advance of medical knowledge has been slow. The pain management world is focused on procedures or biopsychosocial dysfunction. None of which has provided long-lasting relief to a majority of patients. My ideas from 10 or 20 years ago are not what they are today, but today’s ideas are built upon those older ideas. Ideas that are all formed from frustration. The fruits of this frustration have been completely new ideas on how the spine is stabilized, how pain destroys this stability, how the body responds, and why this weakness rarely resolves. From this understanding, what emerged was a new understanding of arthritis, endurance muscle weakness, posture, aging, and a new vocabulary. A necessary new vocabulary is the most audacious thing I have proposed in this book. We need new words to differentiate the new ideas from the old ones. Not a rejection of the old words, but an addition to them. New words create new conversations. New conversations are the solution to frustration.
What is behind the name Body Guitar?
The name “Body Guitar” was formed by my good friend Steve Cranford, a genius in marketing, who was on my back porch singing songs in 2014 while I played guitar. In between songs, he told me that my idea that there were six places in the body that must be stabilized or the body would compensate sounded like the strings of an acoustic guitar. He proposed that I should call the book “Body Guitar”. I told him that that was the stupidest name and idea I had heard yet. The next week, he started sending me Body Guitar logos, and they won me over. In 2018, we opened The Body Guitar Clinic while everyone was telling me to call it something medical, like the Wheeler Institute, etc. In 2024, when I decided to write a new edition which included a new way of stabilizing the lumbar spine, much like an acoustic guitar is stabilized, even Steve was amazed. Steve died unexpectedly from a massive heart attack in March of 2025, but his memory will live on in this book and its ideas.
How is your approach to “pain” a disruptive innovation to understanding treatment for chronic pain?
This book is not a rehash of current beliefs in back pain or stability; it is a completely new re-imagining of these ideas. A new direction that has never been presented before. A pathway that brings many competing groups and ideas together. It is disruptive because of these new ideas, new solutions, and new lexicon. It is a revolution, an “uprise”.
Who is the target audience for your book?
The target audience is patients who are struggling. It is meant as a backdoor into the medical field. My approach should significantly decrease the number of surgeries, spinal cord stimulators, and other expensive procedures currently used in pain management, thus decreasing the physician and hospital profitability in the current insurance system. We are not, or should not be, in the profit business, but only have profit as a byproduct of good care. Right now we have profit without good care. Changing that system is hard. Convincing people in pain who are desperate for solutions is easier, and that’s the approach I took in this book.
What inspired you to enter the medical field?
My passion for medicine started early. No one in my family or extended family was in medicine. I was in Boy Scouts and loved the medical merit badges. Decades later, I saw my beloved seventh-grade teacher Mrs. Peggy Dalton, at a reunion, and the first question she asked me was: “Are you a doctor yet?” Medicine completes me professionally and continues to do so. I have patients whom I can pour my passion and love into as I try to figure out how to make their lives better.
How can people learn more about you, Uprise and Body Guitar?
Website: Bodyguitar.com
Instagram: @getyourbodyintune
Twitter/X: @DrSeanWheeler
Facebook: Bodyguitar Clinic
Thank you so much, Dr. Sean M. Wheeler, for giving us your precious time! We wish you all the best for your journey ahead!
