“Disc” pain ∞
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.
In this 2003 study of 31 Olympic athletes with back pain/sciatica, only about half had signs of disc degeneration or bulging. These are elite athletes, not malingerers. If they say they hurt, they hurt! Yet MRI failed to identify a disc problem in half of them. Just one of many studies of this sort cited in my low back pain tutorial.