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
Don’t Worry About Lifting Technique
The importance of “lift with your legs, not your back” to prevent back pain has been exaggerated!
A compilation of more than 50 examples of the bizarre nonsense spoken by massage therapists with delusions of medical knowledge.
Muscle fever — such a wonderfully descriptive term — is that distinctive muscle pain that nearly everyone gets after intense exercise. How does it work & can anything help?
The cause of sore spots in muscles is mysterious & controversial. Are muscle “knots” basically micro-cramps? Delve into the science.
Walk down a busy street in Canada, Russia, or northern Europe & you’ll pass someone with vitamin D deficiency every few seconds. And they may be in pain, too.
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?
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.
- Jan 16: Personal chronic pain update 2020
- Jan 15: One kind of muscle memory
- Jan 11: Where’s the criticism?
- Jan 6: I love to tell you I told you so: the U-Dream debacle in my household
- Dec 24: You’re not paranoid if they’re really after you
- + 808 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- Jan 15: stretching +New section, stretching for injury rehab —
Quite a Stretch - Jan 14: low back pain +New sub-topic, oral corticosteroids — Compared and contrasted oral and injected corticosteroids; added some colour/context about anabolic steroids.
Save Yourself from Low Back Pain! - Jan 12: central sensitization +Added some useful explanations and definitions of some gnarly jargon, things like “allodynia” and “temporal summation” … which sounds stranger than they are.
Sensitization in Chronic Pain - Jan 8: statistical significance abuse +Updated the American Statistical Association’s new position on completely avoiding the use of “statistically significant.”
Statistical Significance Abuse - Jan 7: platelet-rich plasma +Science update. Added a couple new references and did a little organizing and editing while I was at it. PRP for muscle strain is now very clearly a big fat nothing burger. I suspect other indications will follow suit as the evidence quality continues to accumulate.
Does Platelet-Rich Plasma Injection Work? - + many more
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …
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