If a treatment isn’t specific, it’s probably BS
A weekly nugget or two of pain science news and ideas for patients and pros, usually 400–1000 words. 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.
Something is “good for chronic pain”? Um, what kind?
If a pain treatment isn’t for a specific kind of patient, it’s probably BS, because no one treatment can be very useful for several different types of pain (and effectively infinite sub-types). Even if a treatment actually does work great for one type (sadly unlikely), it probably won’t for any other! If you look at this list of examples of things that actually do work, you’ll notice that they are mostly very specific.
So claims that something is good for “chronic pain” in general — no particular type — are often a red flag. And it’s a very common red flag.
This came up in correspondence with a reader about DMSO for pain (which got a bit a clean up this week).