Is exercise effective, or just efficacious?
Four pages on PainSci cite Beedie 2016: 1. The Complete Guide to Chronic Tension Headaches 2. The Complete Guide to Neck Pain & Cricks 3. Strength Training for Pain & Injury Rehab 4. Exercise works, except when it’s ineffective
PainSci notes on Beedie 2016:
“Efficacy” is how well a treatment works in ideal circumstances, such as in a carefully contrived scientic test. Unfortunately, real life is rarely ideal: “effectiveness” is how well the same thing works in typical clinical settings and patients’ lives. Exercise is well-known to be efficacious, but is often not effective. That is, it works well when tested in the lab, but not for real patients. Effectiveness is what matters to patients!
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.
- Recovery trajectories in common musculoskeletal complaints by diagnosis contra prognostic phenotypes. Aasdahl 2021 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.