Bought and paid for

• Feb 11, 2015 • by Paul Ingraham

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.

But conflicts of interest are always interesting. I recently came across a paper that concluded that slight dehydration has important effects on mood and cognition (Armstrong). I was taking it seriously for a few minutes until I discovered that it was funded in part by a giant corporation that sells bottled water, which made me roll my eyes and get a lot less interested in the results (which were minor anyway, I thought).

So now what to believe? Who knows: the data may be perfectly good, or hopelessly corrupted. We just can’t tell without more information. We’ll simply never know what’s true without more research … which will probably be hard to get anyone but another water bottling company to pay for!