Physical activity and exercise for chronic pain in adults: an overview of Cochrane Reviews
One article on PainSci cites Geneen 2017: A Rational Guide to Fibromyalgia
PainSci notes on Geneen 2017:
Chronic pain, exercise, and physical activity are all heavily studied, and yet the surprising result of this massive review of reviews — a super review of twenty-one other reviews, encompassing 381 studies and more than 37,000 participants — somehow amounts to nothing more than “it’s promising, but more study needed.” How can this be? Because most of those 381 studies were individually small and lame, statistically underpowered. Garbage in, garbage out … on a huge scale.
Where there’s smoke there’s probably at least a small fire: “The available evidence suggests physical activity and exercise is an intervention with few adverse events that may improve pain severity and physical function, and consequent quality of life.” But it’s far from the conclusion we’d like to see (even from underpowered studies). Exercise may be “the closest thing there is to a miracle cure” for many other medical problems, but not so much for chronic pain.
Obvious disclaimer: some kinds of pain are undoubtedly more responsive to exercise than others.
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.
related content
- “Exercise for chronic musculoskeletal pain: A biopsychosocial approach,” John Booth, G Lorimer Moseley, Marcus Schiltenwolf, Aidan Cashin, Michael Davies, and Markus Hübscher, Musculoskeletal Care, 2017.
- “Reasoning exercise dosage for people with persistent pain,” Paul Lagerman, In Touch, 2018.
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.
- A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors: the case of felt power. Gronau 2017 Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology.
- The neck and headaches. Bogduk 2014 Neurol Clin.