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
A compilation of more than 50 examples of the bizarre nonsense spoken by massage therapists with delusions of medical knowledge.
Don’t Worry About Lifting Technique
The importance of “lift with your legs, not your back” to prevent back pain has been exaggerated!
Controversy, stigma & quackery swirl around fibromyalgia like a bad smell. Here’s a rational guide to the mysterious disease of pain, exhaustion & mental fog.
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.
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?
IT band syndrome dominates the side of the knee. Patellofemoral pain is more variable, but usually more in front.
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 22: Antidepressants not great for back pain, arthritis
- Jan 22: Still more steroid risks
- Jan 22: I woke up with it
- Jan 19: Back pain is rarely as dangerous as it feels, except when it is
- Jan 19: Weak collagen science
- + 898 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- Jan 21: muscle strains +More info, strength chapter — More detailed information and advice about training for “muscle balance” between the quads and hamstrings.
The Complete Guide to Muscle Strains - Jan 20: shin splints +Improvements — A bit more and clearer information on the role of radiculopathy/sciatica in differential diagnosis of shin pain.
Shin Splints Treatment, The Complete Guide - Jan 15: missing serious symptoms +Revised and significantly expanded.
Missing Serious Symptoms - Jan 15: fibromyalgia +Science update, added citation and significant discussion of Mascarenhas et al, a huge 2020 meta-analysis of treatments for fibromyalgia. I gave some extra attention to the evidence on cognitive behavioural therapy.
A Rational Guide to Fibromyalgia - Jan 6: fibromyalgia +Added some new emphasis on how difficult fibromyalgia treatment is. People seem to think there must be a treatment for it, but there really isn’t. This disease remains extremely puzzling and generally untreatable, and that point needed to be made more strongly.
A Rational Guide to Fibromyalgia - + many more
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …
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