Is exercise effective, or just efficacious?
Three articles 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
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:
- Relationships Between Sleep Quality and Pain-Related Factors for People with Chronic Low Back Pain: Tests of Reciprocal and Time of Day Effects. Gerhart 2017 Ann Behav Med.
- Modulation in the elastic properties of gastrocnemius muscle heads in individuals with plantar fasciitis and its relationship with pain. Zhou 2020 Sci Rep.
- Association Between Plantar Fasciitis and Isolated Gastrocnemius Tightness. Nakale 2018 Foot Ankle Int.
- No Added Benefit of Combining Dry Needling With Guideline-Based Physical Therapy When Managing Chronic Neck Pain: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Stieven 2020 J Orthop Sports Phys Ther.
- Effectiveness of customised foot orthoses for Achilles tendinopathy: a randomised controlled trial. Munteanu 2015 Br J Sports Med.