Detailed guides to painful problems, treatments & more

Positive trend

 •  • 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.

The treatment of chronic pain is something of a late bloomer in medicine. But when you look at the big picture, it’s easy to see that we’ve been rather busy making an amazing amount of progress in many, many other ways. For some amazing examples, see Visualizing the History of Improving Health around the World. So many of my worst cynical impulses are contradicted by Max Roser’s charts and data. Refreshing! As Bill Clinton said, “Follow the trendlines not the headlines.”

This link couldn’t be a more perfect addition to my article A Historical Perspective On Aches ‘n’ Pains. Hat tip to Todd Hargrove of BetterMovement.org for this item.