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Educated guesses

 •  • 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.

Ideas based only on educated guessing about biology, however reasonable and plausible they may sound, have a nasty habit of falling apart when more directly tested. This is one of the strongest patterns in the history of medicine.

A classic modern example is autologous blood injections for tendonitis: an idea that sounds promising if you just talk about the biology, but fails when tested on actual patients.

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