Deep thought of the day: anecdotes really suck
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.
But then I went and wrote a whole article about that particularly interesting idea: that people have often believed in “treatments” that are actually hurting them, like drinking mercury, and several other famous historical examples. If people have told a lot of success stories about dangerous treatments … well, that says a lot about just how wrong anecdotal evidence can be.