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.
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.
A little bit of inflammation spread all over the place is one possible culprit in chronic pain.
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?
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?
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.
- Feb 20: Are clinicians becoming paralyzed by Pain Science?
- 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
- + 816 more posts …
Recent site updates
A steady stream of content improvements and corrections are all logged, like on Wikipedia:
- Feb 23: delayed-onset muscle soreness +Added more information and references about protein supplementation, especially the branched-chain amino acids.
Post-Exercise, Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness - Feb 22: stretching +More information — Added detail about the practical importance of flexibility. Or lack thereof. Weirdly, this update was harvested from a decade-old Facebook comment.
Quite a Stretch - Feb 20: reassurance for massage therapists +Publication.
Reassurance for Massage Therapists - 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 - + many more
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer …
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