What works for stubborn aches, pains, and 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 and several particularly huge self-help guides. The site is written mainly for patients, but it’s also heavily referenced for health care pros. And I serve up the science of pain, injury, and rehab with a little sass — I try to have fun taking the subject seriously. Read more about PainScience.com.
Paul Ingraham, PainScience publisher
Placebo is fascinating, but its “power” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There is, however, an awful lot of ideologically motivated hype about placebo!
Controversy, stigma & quackery swirl around fibromyalgia like a bad smell. Here’s a rational guide to the mysterious disease of pain, exhaustion & mental fog.
My stretching article has been popular for more than a decade now & 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.
Supposedly fascia can get tight & needs to be “released,” but key examples of research either fail to support fascial therapy or even undermine it. Is it just a fad?
Don’t Worry About Lifting Technique
The importance of “lift with your legs, not your back” to prevent back pain has been exaggerated!
IT band syndrome dominates the side of the knee. Patellofemoral pain is more variable, but usually more in front.
What hurts? Common painful problems and injuries
The main painful topics on PainScience are stubborn problems like trigger points (poorly named, but incredibly common, and often confused with muscle strain), low back pain (of course), common overuse injuries like iliotibial band syndrome, and stranger musculoskeletal glitches like frozen shoulder. Plus dozens more!
→ index of specific painful conditions
And what works? Pain treatments
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 nerve stimulation (TENS).
→ index of treatment & therapy reviews
→ master list of self-help tips for pain
Yes, but why does it hurt? The nature of the beast
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 articles about how pain works
The microblog: pain science news & nuggets
I never stop updating and improving PainScience.com articles and books, hundreds of them, but also blog as I work. The blog is basically the “highlights” section of the site: mostly short posts about the niftiest ideas I’ve come across.
- Nov 16: A nose for pot
- Nov 16: The facile humility of “facilitating” healing
- Nov 12: What if chronic pain is a feature, not a bug?
- Nov 9: The myth of the extremely effective therapist
- Nov 9: Neurosis supplier
- + 797 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- Nov 16: healer syndrome +Added a substantial discussion of the silly idea that a healer isn’t actually doing the heavy lifting, but is merely facilitating self-healing.
Healer Syndrome - Nov 16: frozen shoulder +New chapter, Muscle relaxants (Robaxin, Robaxacet, etc), psychoactives, and sedatives —
Frozen Shoulder Guide - Nov 15: headaches +New chapter, a case study that blurs the line between tension headache and migraine —
Complete Guide to Headaches - Nov 12: spinal nerves and organ health +Science update — Discussed acute effects of SMT on the parasympathetic nervous system, and cited Picchiottino et al on the lack of clinically significant effects.
Organ Health Does Not Depend on Spinal Nerves! - Nov 12: trigger points +Expanded, other causes of chronic widespread pain — Added two more sub-topics: psychological amplification and true psychosomatic pain.
Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome - + many more
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …
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