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 especially 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 and injury with a little sass — I try to have fun taking the subject seriously.~ Paul Ingraham, Publisher

Fibromyalgia

Controversy, stigma & quackery swirl around fibromyalgia like a bad smell. Here’s a rational guide to the mysterious disease of pain, exhaustion & mental fog.
When shoulders freeze

Frozen shoulder is one of the strangest of all musculoskeletal conditions, with ties to metabolic disorders & autoimmune disease.
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.

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), common overuse injuries like iliotibial band syndrome, and stranger musculoskeletal glitches 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.

Oct 11: New article! Deep cervical flexor training
Oct 10: Epsom salts baths for hangovers
Oct 9: A neurological healing process (for back pain)
Oct 9: Prolotherapy snark
Oct 4: What toxins actually are
+ 695 more posts…

Recent site updates

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

Oct 13: morning back pain +New section: “Morning baths are almost miraculous for some kinds of morning back pain.”

Morning Back Pain
Oct 12: trigger points +Editing, crepitus (noise) section — A light re-write, de-emphasizing the dubious link to trigger points.

Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome
Oct 12: neck pain +Major addition, ‘core’ strength section — Added a subsantial new sub-topic: “What if it’s about the coordination, not strength/endurance?” And a minor but fun addition about the DCFs being the “psoas of the neck.” Added anatomy diagram.

Save Yourself from Neck Pain!
Oct 11: frozen shoulder +Significantly improved the answer to the question “How would functional stiffness work?” by including sensitization; also added a substantial new treatment section, “Desensitization and disinhibition.”

Frozen Shoulder Guide
Oct 9: insomnia +Added a footnote about the surprising prevalence and relevance of narcolepsy.

The Insomnia Guide
+ many more

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