Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

Replication needed 

 •  • 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.

“Replication needed” is the ultimate caveat in scientific criticism. It covers all the bases. Everything else is just details. At the end of the day, if promising results cannot be replicated by other researchers, it doesn’t really matter what was wrong with the original research. Either a treatment works well enough to consistently produce impressive results whenever it’s tested … or it doesn’t. Updated article: