Mythbusting in Orthopedics challenges our desire for meaning
Tags: scientific medicine, deep, mind
Two pages on PainSci cite Aspenberg 2014: 1. Placebo Power Hype 2. Make exercise as sexy as the scalpel
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
So what is a myth in medicine? It is not everything that is false, but rather concepts that are based on something akin to a story. It is a good story that meniscal tears cause pain and that when they are removed, the pain goes away as well. Showing that pain relief is mainly due to placebo effects means destroying a good story, which might be as unpopular as depriving some colleagues of a good business.
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.