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
Anatomy has limits. An owl can rotate its head as much as 270° & you can’t, because of differences between owl spines & people spines. There are biomechanical limits on all stretches … some more than others. This article describes 11 muscles you can’t stretch but wish you could.
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!
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?
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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.
Don’t Worry About Lifting Technique
The importance of “lift with your legs, not your back” to prevent back pain has been exaggerated!
A little bit of inflammation spread all over the place is one possible culprit in chronic pain.
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.
- Feb 16: Yet another sneaky pathological pain culprit
- Feb 15: Reassurance for massage therapists
- Feb 11: Is intermittent fasting anti-inflammatory?
- Feb 4: Does sitting cause back pain? Following the evidence back to a previously abandoned position
- Jan 28: Are the chemical ingredients of a human really worth only a couple bucks?
- + 815 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- Feb 18: Achilles tendinitis +Added short but important section warning readers about fluoroquinolone toxicity.
Achilles Tendinitis Treatment Science - Feb 16: subtle systemic inflammation +More upgrades to the intermittent fasting section.
Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation - Feb 14: headaches +Upgraded, over-the-counter pain killers — More detail, more references, and more advice.
Complete Guide to Headaches - Feb 13: opioids for musculoskeletal pain +Miscellaneous editing and improvements. Nost notable: a new footnote about mechanism, and a new sub-section about weak versus strong opioids.
Opioids for Chronic Aches & Pains - Feb 8: headaches +New chapter, medication-overuse headaches —
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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