PainScience.com Audio Articles

Seven popular articles in audio, about stretching, posture, Epsom salts, structuralism, and trigger points

Paul Ingraham • updated Jun 23, 2014

These seven articles are all available in audio format as a free bonus for all e-boxed set customers, or on request for blind visitors (email me). Sorry, but the files cannot be downloaded from this page.

There’s a theme! Five of them are about a popular but all-too questionable idea: the value of stretching, the importance of posture, the power of Epsom salts, the nature of “trigger points,” and the clinical relevance of biomechanical factors (the deepest one, intended mostly for professionals, but not entirely). Each article is a reader favourite or a personal pick. It’s basically the Greatest Hits from the last decade of constantly fine-tuning my writing about controversial and complex subject matter.

• Quite a Stretch
  DESCRIPTIONStretching doesn’t do what people hope it does: it doesn’t warm you up, prevent or treat soreness or injury, enhance peformance, or even physically change muscles. It can make you more flexible, but the value of that is unclear. And stretch might help some kinds of pain, like muscle pain, but that’s quite speculative. Finally, many key muscles are actually impossible to stretch in the first place. DOWNLOAD AUDIOYou must have a boxed set to download audio versions of my articles, or email a request if you are visually impaired. If you are already a boxed set owner, great! There’s a Downloads section in the Introduction for Customers for each all your tutorials (the web versions, of course). 40MB 50min
• Does Posture Correction Matter?
  DESCRIPTIONPosture matters a little, but not a lot. Many habitual postures are long-term adaptations to anatomical quirks that cannot and shouldn’t be changed. Most other “poor posture” is just coping with bad ergonomics. “Posturology” is a mostly speculative and misguided approach to chronic pain. When people seem to be vulnerable to postural stresses, the vulnerability is usually the problem. DOWNLOAD AUDIOYou must have a boxed set to download audio versions of my articles, or email a request if you are visually impaired. If you are already a boxed set owner, great! There’s a Downloads section in the Introduction for Customers for each all your tutorials (the web versions, of course). 52MB 64min
• Does Epsom Salt Work?
  DESCRIPTIONEpsom salt in your bath makes bath water feel “silkier,” but that’s probably all: it’s unlikely to be biologically relevant to aches and pains, and it may not even make it through the skin (osmosis is not even relevant, and it cannot “detox” anything). DOWNLOAD AUDIOYou must have a boxed set to download audio versions of my articles, or email a request if you are visually impaired. If you are already a boxed set owner, great! There’s a Downloads section in the Introduction for Customers for each all your tutorials (the web versions, of course). 45MB 91min
• Your Back Is Not Out of Alignment
  DESCRIPTION“Structuralism” is the excessive focus on causes of pain like crookedness and biomechanical problems. It’s an old and inadequate view of how pain works, but it persists because it offers comforting, marketable simplicity that is the mainstay of entire styles of therapy. DOWNLOAD AUDIOYou must have a boxed set to download audio versions of my articles, or email a request if you are visually impaired. If you are already a boxed set owner, great! There’s a Downloads section in the Introduction for Customers for each all your tutorials (the web versions, of course). 44MB 112min
• Trigger Point Doubts
  DESCRIPTIONPeople have muscle pain and sensitive spots in muscle tissue — “muscle knots” — and they can be severe. What’s going on? The main theory is that a trigger point is an isolated spasm, but it’s just a theory, trigger point science is half-baked and controversial, and it’s not even clear that it’s a “muscle” problem. Although I sell a book about trigger points, it’s an ethical necessity to question the validity of the idea. DOWNLOAD AUDIOYou must have a boxed set to download audio versions of my articles, or email a request if you are visually impaired. If you are already a boxed set owner, great! There’s a Downloads section in the Introduction for Customers for each all your tutorials (the web versions, of course). 31MB 38min
• Pain is Weird
  DESCRIPTIONModern pain science shows that pain is an unpredictable sensation thoroughly tuned by the brain and not as closely related to tissue trouble as most people assume. So can we think pain away? Probably not, but we may be able to influence it. DOWNLOAD AUDIOYou must have a boxed set to download audio versions of my articles, or email a request if you are visually impaired. If you are already a boxed set owner, great! There’s a Downloads section in the Introduction for Customers for each all your tutorials (the web versions, of course). 34MB 41min
• A Stretching Experiment
  DESCRIPTIONWhat happens when you stretch your hamstrings intensely for several minutes a day in a steam room? The results of a thorough, careful personal experiment. Your mileage may vary! DOWNLOAD AUDIOYou must have a boxed set to download audio versions of my articles, or email a request if you are visually impaired. If you are already a boxed set owner, great! There’s a Downloads section in the Introduction for Customers for each all your tutorials (the web versions, of course). 15MB 29min

The articles are all read by me, professionally produced (by Vancouver film-maker and creative-polymath Kennedy Goodkey), and embellished with some original music (by Vancouver composer Phil Mahoney). I used to be a theatre and radio guy, so these recordings were a hoot for me to make, and they don’t suck. I will probably do more, and some will be updated (especially the trigger point doubts project, which is on-going and has already been updated once).

I created these to be a nice perk for all e-boxed set customers, so to get them you have to purchase a boxed set.

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Two Audio Books Too

I have audio versions of two of my books as well: plantar fasciitis and IT band syndrome. Those are available to anyone who purchases those individual tutorials (or the boxed set, of course).