Kill pain, kill performance ∞
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.
How’s this for a counter-intuitive research result? Alex Hutchinson:
When physiologists at the University of Wisconsin used spinal injections of a powerful painkiller to block lower-body pain in a group of cyclists, the cyclists actually got slower. They initially felt great and started out faster than normal, but then faded. Without the feedback of pain, they couldn’t pace themselves properly.
Fascinating.