Historical perspective ugprades ∞

• Dec 8, 2014 • 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.

Now with even more perspective! A few years ago I wrote a piece about this idea:

For most of history, medicine has had bigger, scarier fish to fry than aches & pains. It still does. Yet now we do have the medical “luxury” of paying more attention to relatively minor pain problems that were overshadowed by the more critical medical issues of the past. And pain problems aren’t so minor — just less major than things that kill you outright.

I just gave that piece a major overhaul. For a long time it was a bit of a runt, just a short post making a nice but simple point very briefly. Now it’s more of an “article,” filled out nicely as an answer to the question, “Ever wonder why there aren’t better treatments for aches and pains?”