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183 inconclusive compression gear studies

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Compression gear for performance enhancement and recovery is yet another topic in this field where the science is a disheartening stew of mediocre trials that don’t actually answer the question.

There are so many unanswered questions like this in sports, rehab, and pain medicine that writing about it can seem futile. Sometimes I feel like I have run out of new ways to say “meh”! Today I am delighted to let Alex Hutchinson do it for me:

“Among those 183 studies, you can find ample evidence for whatever position you want to defend about compression — that they’re a miracle, a scam, or somewhere in between.”

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