PainScience.com • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
And what doesn’t work, and why? PainScience.com reviews your treatment options for many common painful problems, and explains the nature of the pain beast, with hundreds of articles, several huge self-help guides to common pain problems, all routinely updated, and readable enough for anyone but heavily referenced for professionals. I serve up the science of pain with some sass — I try to have fun taking this subject seriously. ~ Paul Ingraham, publisher
My stretching article has been popular for more than a decade now, and it’s one of the best examples of what this website is all about: thorough, sassy critical analysis & tipping over sacred cows with facts n stuff.
A compilation of more than 50 examples of the bizarre nonsense spoken by massage therapists with delusions of medical knowledge.
Supposedly fascia can get tight and needs to be “released,” but key examples of research either fail to support fascial therapy or even undermine it. Is it just a fad?
The main painful topics on PainScience are stubborn pain problems like trigger points (poorly named, but incredibly common, and often confused with muscle strain), low back pain (of course), and common overuse injuries like iliotibial band syndrome and weird musculoskeletal problems like frozen shoulder. Plus dozens more!
→ index of painful conditions
Review of treatment methods (with plenty of debunking) is a major theme on PainScience.com: popular DIY options like self-massage, strength training, ice or heat, or the bizarrely controversial Epsom salts. I also review major therapy methods like massage or chiropractic, and gadgets like ultrasound and transcutaneous electrical stimulation (TENS).
→ index of treatments
Pain “demands an explanation,” wrote poet Ann Carson, but pain is weird. It can be a huge help to understand things like the types of pain, or how insomnia makes pain so much worse, or the role of chronic low-grade inflammation. On the other hand, there are also many over-rated causes of pain like misalignment and poor posture.
→ index of pain explanations
As I work on keeping >200 feature articles and tutorials up-to-date, I blog about the niftiest ideas I come across, plus major updates and site news.
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer…