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, 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

Feel like you’re on fire?

A little bit of inflammation spread all over the place is one possible culprit in chronic pain.
Are trigger points for real?

The cause of sore spots in muscles is mysterious & controversial. Are muscle “knots” basically micro-cramps? Delve into the science.
Does electrical nerve stim work?

The newest featured treatment review on PainScience.com, a deep dive into the science of zapping yourself to treat pain.

What hurts? Common pain problems

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

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 stimulation (TENS).
→ index of treatments

Drawing of a knob representing pain intensity, dialed up to 11.

Yes, but why does it hurt?

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

The microblog: pain science news & nuggets

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.

Jul 21: Cervical myodural bridges: an obscure cause of neck pain?
Jul 6: Understand chronic pain before operating
Jun 29: Frozen shoulder bombshell: it ain’t self-limiting
Jun 28: Shoddy back pain information from Consumer Reports
Jun 14: The corrective exercise trap
+ 551 more posts…

Recent site updates

A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:

Jul 21: tension headaches +Improvements to the discussion of cervical myodural bridges.

Complete Guide to Tension Headaches
Jul 20: suboccipitals massage +Added new section, “Do you have a trigger points under your skull? Or is that just a cervical myodural bridge?” Added more detail about stretching. Plus several other minor improvements.

Massage Therapy for Tension Headaches
Jul 20: acupuncture +Added citation to Vickers et al, with skeptical analysis.

Does Acupuncture Work for Pain?
Jul 15: stretching +Science update — Cited and discussed implications of anti-inflammatory effect reported by Berrueta et al.

Quite a Stretch
Jul 15: stretching +Revised — A heavy edit of the post-exercise soreness section for clarity and brevity.

Quite a Stretch
+ many more

You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer…