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
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.
A little bit of inflammation spread all over the place is one possible culprit in chronic pain.
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.
IT band syndrome dominates the side of the knee. Patellofemoral pain is more variable, but usually more in front.
The cause of sore spots in muscles is mysterious & controversial. Are muscle “knots” basically micro-cramps? Delve into the science.
A compilation of more than 50 examples of the bizarre nonsense spoken by massage therapists with delusions of medical knowledge.
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.
- Dec 9: New headache book makes it an even ten
- Dec 9: The power of the NYT, the meaning of “pain is an opinion,” and much ado about nothing
- Dec 2: Quoted in the NYT on the topic of “pain and the mind”
- Nov 26: Muscle relaxants are odd
- Nov 26: Why do joints feel stiff after getting up?
- + 802 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- Dec 9: iliotibial band syndrome +Major upgrade, hip and thigh pain section — Much clearer and more thorough integration of greater trochanteric pain syndrome.
Save Yourself from IT Band Syndrome! - Dec 4: headaches +Book launch — The headache guide has been free since I first introduced it in the early 2013. Six years and hundreds of hours of development later, it joins my inventory of full-blown books. It’s the second addition in 2019 (after frozen shoulder this summer), after years without any new ones. It is now for sale for $20 USD. All existing boxed set customers will have access automatically — someone who bought a set in 2009 is getting a new book out of that purchase a decade later.
Complete Guide to Headaches - Dec 3: headaches +New chapter, all about treating jaw issues —
Complete Guide to Headaches - Nov 30: excessive sitting +Science update, added citation to Akins et al on the effect of mutiple days of laziness on exercise benefits (hint: it’s not good).
The Trouble with Chairs - Nov 28: headaches +New chapter, the role of the jaw in headache —
Complete Guide to Headaches - + many more
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …
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