PainScience.com • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
And what doesn’t work, and why? PainScience.com reviews your treatment options and the nature of the beast: hundreds of self-help articles, plus several big tutorials about common musculoskeletal pain problems, routinely updated, and readable enough for anyone but heavily referenced for professionals. (There’s also a huge pain science bibliography.) I serve up the science of pain with some sass — I try to have fun taking this subject seriously. ~ Paul Ingraham, publisher
Muscle fever — such a wonderfully descriptive term — is that distinctive muscle pain that nearly everyone gets after intense exercise. How does it work and can anything help?
Does electrical nerve stim work?
The newest featured treatment review on PainScience.com, a deep dive into the science of zapping yourself to treat pain.
My stretching article has been popular for more than a decade now, and it’s one of the best examples of what this website is all about: thorough, sassy critical analysis, and tipping over sacred cows with facts n stuff.
IT band syndrome dominates the side of the knee. Patellofemoral pain is more variable, but usually more in front.
Supposedly fascia can get tight and needs to be “released,” but key examples of research either fail to support fascial therapy or even undermine it. Is it just a fad?
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!
The main painful topics on PainScience are stubborn pain problems like trigger points (poorly named, but incredibly common, and often confused with muscle strain), neck pain and low back pain (of course), and common overuse injuries like plantar fasciitis, shin splints and the two kinds of runner’s knee, one of which I’ve had in spades (IT band syndrome) and the one lots of non-runners get (patellofemoral pain). Plus many more topics (but those are the ones I’ve written books about).
Review (and some debunking) of treatment methods is a major theme here. Get started with a big collection of pain survival tips, with links to dozens more articles about popular DIY treatments like self-massage, strength training, ice or heat, the amazingly controversial Epsom salts, and pain creams like Traumeel (arnica). I also review major therapy methods like massage, chiropractic, and acupuncture.
Pain “demands an explanation,” wrote poet Ann Carson — but pain is quite weird and misleading. If you have chronic pain, it can be a huge help to understand things like why injuries sometimes heal slowly or how insomnia makes pain so much worse. On the other hand, there’s a lot you don’t need to worry about, like your back being out of alignment and bad posture, both highly over-rated causes of pain.
As I work on feature articles and tutorials, I blog about the most niftiest ideas I come across, plus major updates and site news. The archives are years deep.
PainScience.com is constantly updated with new science and ideas, and all changes are logged — like on Wikipedia. See the What’s New? page for listings of all updates. These are the last 10 topic updates, over 8 days:
You’ve got a lot of reading to do! Sorry it’s all here on the computer…