Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

Written like an ad

 •  • 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.

If the Wikipedia page for a treatment sports the warning “appears to be written like an advertisement,” that’s a bright red flag about its validity. Same with the “needs additional citations” warning. I’ve come across this many times over the years, but here’s the good example I noticed this morning: Extracorporeal shockwave therapy [Wikipedia].