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Blood injection treatment bombs a test 

 •  • 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.

Utterly unsurprising: injecting your own blood doesn’t help tendinitis. Nice to have a decent new trial about this over-hyped therapy though.

The administration of two unguided peritendinous autologous blood injections one month apart, in addition to a standardised eccentric training programme, provides no additional benefit in the treatment of mid-portion Achilles tendinopathy.

Not many good treatment ideas work as well in practice as they do in theory. The null hypothesis is super reliable.

“Impact of autologous blood injections in treatment of mid-portion Achilles tendinopathy: double blind randomised controlled trial”
Bell et al. British Medical Journal. Volume 346, Number , f2310. 2013.

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