What works for stubborn aches, pains, and injuries?
And what doesn’t work, and why? PainScience.com thoroughly reviews the imperfect treatment options for many common painful problems in a library of deep-dive articles and several particularly huge self-help guides. The site is written for patients, but it’s also heavily referenced for health care pros. 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
Vancouver, Canada
Why the salamander? More mascot than logo, the salamander’s astonishing regenerative biology is a symbol of healing. More.
The cause of sore spots in muscles is mysterious & controversial. Are muscle “knots” basically micro-cramps? Delve into the science.
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.
A little bit of inflammation spread all over the place is one possible culprit in chronic pain.
A compilation of more than 50 examples of the bizarre nonsense spoken by massage therapists with delusions of medical knowledge.
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!
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.
- Apr 10: New cash register
- Mar 27: The remove-or-improve project: 2 major article upgrades so far
- Mar 8: New PainSci article about vaginismus
- Mar 6: Defensive medicine and MRI for back pain
- Mar 6: The taping of Methai the elephant
- + 912 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- Apr 8: update to multiple pages +The PainScience.com store checkout has been rebooted. Specifically, I have migrated from Stripe’s legacy checkout system to their new-fangled hosted checkout. See the official announcement for a few details, or my personal blog for a behind-the-scenes look: The new online store story (“If only I had procrastinated more”).
- Mar 24: causes of pain +Rewrote the section on neuroinflammation. It had been hastily excerpted and abridged from another article. Now it’s a proper standalone summary and much clearer.
34 Surprising Causes of Pain - Mar 24: pseudo-quackery +Added “posturology” to the list of pseudo-quackeries.
Pseudo-Quackery in the Treatment of Pain - Mar 23: posture +Added links — Added six reading recommendations, all with mini-reviews.
Does Posture Matter? - Mar 19: delayed-onset muscle soreness +New section: “Waiting it out or working through it: the role of rest and more exercise in DOMS treatment” in which I address two key questions I should have answered here long ago: “Should you exercise while sore?” and “Can exercising while sore actually help?”
A Deep Dive into Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness - + many more
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …
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