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:
- Photobiomodulation therapy is not better than placebo in patients with chronic nonspecific low back pain: a randomised placebo-controlled trial. Guimarães 2021 Pain.
- No effect of creatine monohydrate supplementation on inflammatory and cartilage degradation biomarkers in individuals with knee osteoarthritis. Cornish 2018 Nutr Res.
- The CANBACK trial: a randomised, controlled clinical trial of oral cannabidiol for people presenting to the emergency department with acute low back pain. Bebee 2021 Med J Aust.
- 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.