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 especially 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 and injury with a little sass — I try to have fun taking the subject seriously. Read more about PainScience.com or explore the sitemap. ~ Paul Ingraham, Publisher

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Sore muscles?

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?
Does fascia matter?

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?
What kind of runner’s knee?

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

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

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

As I work on keeping >200 feature articles and tutorials up-to-date, I blog about the niftiest ideas I come across, plus major updates and site news.

A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:

Dec 15: neck pain +Upgraded — There’s a new sub-section about the role of stress in any kind of chronic pain, and bunch of revision so that the section is more focused on the concept of vulnerability. This is a setup for more practical advice, still to come, about how to attempt to be less vulnerable.

Save Yourself from Neck Pain!
Dec 13: low back pain +Expansion — Continued the process of making this section into a more substantive exploration of the idea of specific back pain, and added a new example, a case study of back pain caused by a tumour on a nerve root.

Save Yourself from Low Back Pain!
Dec 12: causes of pain +New section: “Non-obvious nerve entrapment.”

Surprising Causes of Pain
Dec 12: contrasting +New section, based on Higgins et al: “Keep it shallow (because contrasting is unlikely to have much effect on deeper tissues).”

Contrast Hydrotherapy
Dec 8: platelet-rich plasma +Cited Mascarenhas et al on PRP for osteoarthritis (and it’s the usual story: garbage in, garbage out, no conclusion, no compelling evidence).

Does Platelet-Rich Plasma Injection Work?
+ many more

You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …