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
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.
A compilation of more than 50 examples of the bizarre nonsense spoken by massage therapists with delusions of medical knowledge.
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.
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?
The cause of sore spots in muscles is mysterious & controversial. Are muscle “knots” basically micro-cramps? Delve into the science.
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.
- May 6: Study finds jack shit (which is to be expected)
- May 3: Wax on, wax off
- May 1: Stretching chat with podiatrists
- May 1: “Massage parlour” ecommerce hijinks
- Apr 26: Maximally ungracious: straining to violate principle of charity
- + 835 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- May 9: reassurance for massage therapists +Added the point that good healthcare is a process not a product/service, and that this represents a significant opportunity for massage therapists (but massage is also a great product/service).
Reassurance for Massage Therapists - May 9: pseudo-quackery +Added a new short section, “Process versus product.”
Pseudo-Quackery in the Treatment of Pain - May 4: shin splints +Upgraded, hall of treatment shame — More and better information, and also probably mostly complete now. There might be some other ridiculous treatments for shin splints, but probably none that are popular enough to bother writing a paragraph about.
Save Yourself from Shin Splints! - May 4: patellofemoral syndrome +New content, orthotics chapter — A minor but nice addition of information (and a story) about heels and heel lifts.
Save Yourself from Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome! - May 4: patellofemoral syndrome +Minor update, rest introduction — Added a couple small but good clarifications, and an amusing bit of perspective, in my never-ending quest to effectively explain the importance of rest.
Save Yourself from Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome! - + many more
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …
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