What’s New on PainScience.com?
New featured articles, updates to articles, recent blog posts, and noteworthy new scientific papers
See also the about page, complete articles index, and sitemap.
I have been expanding and upgrading this website for 20 years now, and full-time since 2010. Useful new references are added almost daily. I am always working on an endless list of improvements, and corrections and mea culpas are always the highest priority items. This page lists everything that’s new or changed lately … or just Google for content that’s new in the last month or year. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher
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The 10 newest featured articles on PainScience.com (out of 240)
- Bone on Bone » Jun 2024
- DMSO for Pain » Jun 2024
- Manual Therapy: What is it, and does it work? » Jan 2024
- Reluctantly Reconsidering RESTORE » Dec 2023
- Whole Body Cryotherapy for Pain » Nov 2023
- Does Pandiculation “Reset” Muscle Tone? » Jan 2023
- The Double-Edged Sword of Imaging to Diagnose Pain » Mar 2022
- The Tibiofibular Joint and Knee Pain » Feb 2022
- Ozone Therapy for Pain » Dec 2021
The last 60 updates to featured articles and tutorials
Like good footnotes, update logging sets PainScience.com apart from most other health websites and blogs. It’s fine print, but important fine print, in the same spirit of transparency as the editing history available for Wikipedia pages. I log any change to articles that might be of interest to a keen reader.
Current Update Stats — 60 updates to 35 articles & books in 155 days, breaking down into 21 major updates, 24 medium, 15 minor. That’s every 2.6 days in recent history; there have been 1779 updates since comprehensive logging started in mid-2016 ?Comprehensive update logging started in the summer of 2016. Prior to that, I only logged major updates for the most popular and controversial articles. (about one every other day) … plus very roughly ten thousand more since the early 2000s. See the complete update archives.
showing of 60 recent updates
| M | Dec 8 | Does Ultrasound or Shockwave Therapy Work? — Science update: several citations about shockwave for erectile dysfunction (just one line in the article, but the footnotes are practically a mini-article unto themselves). |
| S | Dec 6 | Vitamins, Minerals & Supplements for Pain & Healing — Minor science updates and additions about creatine. |
| S | Dec 6 | The Insomnia Guide for Chronic Pain Patients — Added a little more about creatine and it’s potential to treat sleep deprivation. |
| S | Dec 3 | Trigger Points on Trial — Minor editing for clarity and currency. |
| S | Dec 3 | How to Treat Sciatic Nerve Pain — Added a comprehensive list of the major diagnostic possibilities. |
| S | Dec 3 | Does Epsom Salt Work? — Added sidebar, strange magnesium claims — Added a sidebar for colour and whimsy: “Weird health claims about magnesium.” |
| M | Dec 1 | 14 Kinds of Bogus Citations — I finally added “The Zombie.” Better late than never! |
| L | Nov 30 | Achilles Tendinitis Treatment Science — Substantial science update and general upgrade to the topical glyceryl trinitrate section. |
| M | Nov 30 | Salamander and Regeneration Science — New section, “Every therapy in the rehab business thinks its ‘regenerative’.” |
| S | Nov 26 | What Happened To My Barber? — Added a diagram of artery dissection. |
| M | Nov 26 | Alternative Medicine’s Choice — Added a significant sidebar, “The epic double-standards for mainstream and alternative medicine.” |
| M | Nov 23 | The Complete Guide to Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain — More content, dry needling — Added a substantial new sub-section, “Overestimating success rates for dry needling,” which explores the way clinicians are mostly unaware of their substantial failures with dry needling. |
| L | Nov 22 | Alternative Medicine’s Choice — Improved a section I added a while back and forgot to log: “Alternative medicine: hung up on pseudoscience and anti-science.” |
| L | Nov 19 | Cramps, Spasms, Tremors & Twitches — Added a new section about the instructive extreme of the spasticity of rabies infections — a disease that literally kills with cramps. |
| M | Nov 15 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — New content, exercise is anti-inflammatory — Added a more general summary of the case for exercise being “anti-inflammatory. |
| M | Nov 15 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — Science update, treatment — Updates, clarifications, and additions based on new evidence. |
| M | Nov 14 | Strength Training for Pain & Injury Rehab — Added many photos of “women who lift heavy things.” |
| M | Nov 14 | Chronic Pain and Inequality — More detailed section about the myth of women's fragility, and the risks of pelvic organ prolapse with heavy lifting, plus a substantial footnote about going “beyond kegels” to build strength to prevent POP. |
| M | Nov 11 | Complete Guide to Frozen Shoulder — Science updated, steroids section — Added an encouraging anecdote about steroids working really well for frozen shoulder, and a section about the huge GRASP trial of steroids vs. exercise (not for frozen shoulder, but still relevant). |
| L | Nov 9 | Does Hip Strengthening Work for IT Band Syndrome? — A long overdue update to this topic, but … I was waiting for worthwhile science. It finally arrived (Leppänen) and it challenges my bias quite effectively. But it’s still just one study. |
| M | Nov 9 | Does Ultrasound or Shockwave Therapy Work? — Improvements to the section, “Microtraumatizing yourself back to health.” |
| M | Nov 7 | Does Ultrasound or Shockwave Therapy Work? — Continued improvements to shockwave content. Today I added more detail about shockwave’s ability to cause microtrauma and break up calcifications. |
| L | Nov 5 | Vibration Therapies, from Massage Guns to Jacuzzis — Added new section, “The shockwave evidence,” which isn’t great and reflects poorly on the even weaker evidence for massage guns. |
| L | Nov 5 | Does Ultrasound or Shockwave Therapy Work? — More extensive changes and reorganization, with substantial upgrades to all the information about shockwave therapy. |
| S | Nov 1 | The Pressure Question in Massage Therapy — Enriched the intro with a little “deeper” perspective on the appeal of deep tissue massage. |
| M | Oct 30 | Does Ultrasound or Shockwave Therapy Work? — Minor but widespread improvements, and some science updates. Shockwave therapy is becoming a more prominent part of the article as it replaces low-intensity ultrasound in the marketplace. |
| M | Oct 27 | The Insomnia Guide for Chronic Pain Patients — Science update. Added more nuanced information about creatine. Does it compensate for the effects of the sleep deprivation it causes? |
| L | Oct 26 | Strength Training for Pain & Injury Rehab — Added sub-topic, “Weightlifting as medicine for pain and injury.” This article has always mostly been about the systemic, anti-aging, and injury prevention benefits of resistance training. To the extent that it discussed resistance training as a rehab tool, it was mostly to push back against the dominent physical therapy paradigm of “corrective” strength training intended to address perceived biomechanical deficiencies. Despite that problem, resistance training probably is directly analgesic and/or therapeutic — and that optimistic perspective has now been added to the article, finally. And there’s a bunch more coming. |
| L | Oct 25 | Tennis Elbow Guide — Added a “story about pain relief from doing the most painful thing,” which was just simple strength training. |
| M | Oct 23 | Complete Guide to Frozen Shoulder — Added — A new entry for the hall of treatment shame: “Tok sen massage (hammer-and-wedge, from an extremely popular internet video).” |
| L | Oct 22 | The Chiropractic Controversies — Added a section, “But is it chiropractic? Hammering home the profession’s PR challenges.” This is similar to the recent blog post, but with significant revisions and additions. I also updated the “chiropractors are not trusted” citation at the top of the article — still the same statistic after almost 20 years (and probably much longer). |
| L | Oct 21 | Placebo Power Hype — Added a section about therapy theatre. |
| S | Oct 16 | Psoas, So What? — Science update: added a minor but interesting citation about the role of iliopsoas in sprinting. |
| L | Oct 9 | Guide to Repetitive Strain Injuries — Substantial editing, revision, and upgrades for the (very large) members only section of this article. |
| S | Oct 9 | Progressive Training — Minor science update. |
| S | Sep 30 | What Works for Chronic Pain? — Added “a new generation of pain-killers” as a third category of legitimately promising “advanced” approaches to pain. |
| M | Sep 19 | The Complete Guide to Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome — Science update, patellar circulation — At last, some long-awaited new patellar circulation evidence, plus significant revision and other improvements, especially the addition of a new discussion about the therapeutic implications (does exercise improve circulation, mainly). |
| L | Sep 16 | Quite a Stretch — New — Substantial new sidebar, “Reciprocal inhibition invalidated,” about how a major premise for “advanced” PNF stretching was largely disproven in 2009. |
| S | Sep 16 | Pain is Weird — Science update, pulsatile pain — Added a dash of extra science about how the rhythm of pulsatile pain is set (if it’s not the heart rate). |
| M | Sep 8 | Chronic Pain and Inequality — Science update: added a citation to Jin, showing strong links between systemic racism and chronic pain, with a particularly robust footnote on the topic. |
| M | Sep 6 | Cramps, Spasms, Tremors & Twitches — New section about magnesium for cramps. |
| L | Sep 5 | Placebo Power Hype — Added a section about placebo analgesia — very better-late-than-never in the evolution of this article! Also added a new summary for the article, and a nerdy but critical clarification about the difference between the placebo “effect” versus “response.” There are two important new citations to Evers and Hohenschurz-Schmidt. |
| S | Aug 28 | Does Ultrasound or Shockwave Therapy Work? — Science update for ESWT for plantar fasciitis. |
| S | Aug 28 | Zapped! Does TENS work for pain? — Science update for pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. |
| M | Aug 22 | The Complete Guide to Low Back Pain — Science update, intro to the nature of the beast — First update to this section in eight years, because the basic point has been sound the whole time. What changed? Better science, just a particularly good and relevant study that supports the gist of this introduction more strongly than anything that was available before. |
| M | Aug 21 | 38 Surprising Causes of Pain — Complete re-write of the toxins and poisons section. |
| L | Aug 19 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — Major upgrade, food additives — Added new examples and much more detail, plus a new image. |
| M | Aug 19 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — Upgrade, microplastics — More detail, added an image. |
| L | Aug 19 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — Major upgrade, pollutants — More detailed hazard and risk assessment, much more information about lead, new images, and useful good news about indoor air quality management options. |
| L | Aug 14 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — New section. |
| M | Aug 13 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — Upgraded, surgical meshes — Expanded and improved the discussion of surgical meshes, especially acknowledging the degree of controversy and lack of evidence. |
| L | Aug 8 | Chronic, Subtle, Systemic Inflammation — New sub-topic, allergies — Added a discussion of “Mammalian meat allergy” (yes, a real thing). The section was also removed from the member’s only area and is now available to all. |
| L | Aug 6 | Strength Training for Pain & Injury Rehab — New sub-topic, “Strengthening headwinds and handicaps.” |
| M | Jul 29 | The Complete Guide to Low Back Pain — New sub-topic, backpacks and back pain. |
| L | Jul 25 | Placebo Power Hype — Added a new members-only section: “3 placebo paradoxes pacified.” |
| S | Jul 25 | Reluctantly Reconsidering RESTORE — Added a footnote clarifying a potentially controversial point about the nature of CFT. |
| S | Jul 24 | Vitamins, Minerals & Supplements for Pain & Healing — Added a sidebar summarizing the potential harms of supplements. |
| L | Jul 21 | The Complete Guide to Low Back Pain — New chapter, all about walking for back pain. |
| M | Jul 16 | Quite a Stretch — Revised intro — Thoroughly re-wrote the introduction and summaries (which are often used when the article is cited by other articles). It’s amazing to me that I can re-visit one of my oldest and most polished articles and immediately find many ways to improve it! Revising introdutions and summaries isn't all that significant for readers, at least not consciously, but it is an art form unto itself — it takes a great deal of thoughtful work to capture as many key points as possible from the body of the article and compress them as much as possible. |
| L | Jul 5 | Many Pages — Significant under-the-hood upgrade to the site. PainSci grew out of two different “content management systems,” which has slowly become a major publishing challenge. This update begins the process of merging them. While largely invisible to visitors, there are a few useful changes: for instance, bibliography pages now “know about” blog posts, and can say which five posts they’ve been cited in. That was a long time coming, I can tell you! |
The last 20 blog posts
Blog posts are smaller and more ephemeral than the articles in PainSci’s main library. I blog about many topics as I work on books and permanent articles. There are 1206 posts dating back to 2010.
- Goodbye and good riddance, Google Analytics » Dec 6, 24
- Can creatine treat its own insomnia side effect? » Dec 5, 24
- Weird health claims about magnesium » Dec 3, 24
- Shockwave therapy: ultrasound reborn! 🔈 » Nov 30, 24
- STUDY: Vibration therapy for a disease triggered by vibration » Nov 27, 24
- Overestimating “success rates” (for dry needling) » Nov 23, 24
- The awful power of cramps demonstrated by rabies » Nov 18, 24
- STUDY: Exercise eases inflammatory back pain—but why? » Nov 15, 24
- Q&A: Beyond kegels for pelvic organ prolapse prevention » Nov 13, 24
- Lose belly fat, hurt less (because metabolism) » Nov 12, 24
- Exercise is anti-inflammatory medicine for injuries (Member Post) 🔈 » Nov 8, 24
- The myth of feminine fragility » Nov 4, 24
- You’ve only heard of marketable pain treatments » Oct 29, 24
- STUDY: Can you attack back pain with knowledge bombs? » Oct 23, 24
- Pain relief from doing the most painful thing 🔈 » Oct 19, 24
- STUDY: Hip and core strength can prevent running injuries » Oct 16, 24
- Chiropractic with a hammer » Oct 15, 24
- Blog pause for Covid recovery & post stockpiling » Oct 5, 24
- Plug your sodium channels with VX-548 » Sep 30, 24
- Trigger points debate greatly delayed (Member Post) 🔈 » Sep 27, 24
The last 20 bibliography items with beefier summaries
Many scientific papers added to the bibliography are boring and utilitarian, but some are much more interesting, like small blog posts about the science — like the recent highlights are listed here. The are roughly 4000 more items in the whole bibliography, ~750 of them more substantively annotated.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan et al., 2024, Br J Sports Med. » added Nov 2024
- The Effects of Shock Wave Therapy on the Symptoms and Function of Individuals With Dupuytren Disease: A Systematic Review. Yazdani et al., 2024, Arch Phys Med Rehabil. » added Oct 2024
- Heavy Slow Resistance Versus Eccentric Training as Treatment for Achilles Tendinopathy: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Beyer et al., 2015, Am J Sports Med. » added Oct 2024
- The effect of progressive and individualised sport-specific training on the prevalence of injury in football and handball student athletes: a randomised controlled trial. Hagum et al., 2023, Front Sports Act Living. » added Oct 2024
- The anti-inflammatory effect of exercise: its role in diabetes and cardiovascular disease control. Pedersen et al., 2006, Essays Biochem. » added Oct 2024
- Impaired hemodynamics of the patella in patients with patellofemoral pain: A case-control study. Ophey et al., 2024, J Exp Orthop. » added Sep 2024
- Pain neuroscience education is not superior to spinal physiology and ergonomics education within a short multidisciplinary rehabilitation program: A randomized controlled trial. Adenis et al., 2024, Musculoskelet Sci Pract. » added Sep 2024
- Antagonist muscle activity during stretching: a paradox re-assessed. Etnyre et al., 1988, Med Sci Sports Exerc. » added Sep 2024
- Does throbbing pain have a brain signature? Mo et al., 2013, Pain. » added Sep 2024
- Neurophysiological reflex mechanisms' lack of contribution to the success of PNF stretches. Mitchell et al., 2009, J Sport Rehabil. » added Sep 2024
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt et al., 2024, Eur J Pain. » added Sep 2024
- Effects of exercise therapy in axial spondyloarthritis: A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of randomized trials. Zhang et al., 2024, Arch Phys Med Rehabil. » added Aug 2024
- The impact of stressful life events on centralized pain and pain intensity: A combined model examining the mediating roles of anger and perceived injustice among racially minoritized adults with chronic pain. Jin et al., 2024, J Pain. » added Aug 2024
- Physical activity paradox: providing evidence-based guidance while closing research gaps. Pronk et al., 2024, Br J Sports Med. » added Aug 2024
- Is radial extracorporeal shock wave therapy (rESWT), sham-rESWT or a standardised exercise programme in combination with advice plus customised foot orthoses more effective than advice plus customised foot orthoses alone in the treatment of plantar fasciopathy? A double-blind, randomised, sham-controlled trial. Heide et al., 2024, Br J Sports Med. » added Aug 2024
- Long distance running and knee osteoarthritis. A prospective study. Chakravarty et al., 2008, Am J Prev Med. » added Jul 2024
- DMSO Represses Inflammatory Cytokine Production from Human Blood Cells and Reduces Autoimmune Arthritis. Elisia et al., 2016, PLoS One. » added Jun 2024
- DMSO induces drastic changes in human cellular processes and epigenetic landscape in vitro. Verheijen et al., 2019, Sci Rep. » added Jun 2024
- Efficacy of prescribed opioids for acute pain after being discharged from the emergency department: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Daoust et al., 2023, Acad Emerg Med. » added Jun 2024
- Physician Empathy and Chronic Pain Outcomes. Licciardone et al., 2024, JAMA Netw Open. » added Jun 2024
What’s new on this page about new stuff?
Ironically, I’ve actually updated this page quite a few times without logging the change. 😜
2023 — An update to the updates page?! It’s so meta! It’s not going to happen often, but I just finished improving the whole update-logging system in several ways. Most of the upgrades are "under the hood," but there is now much better filtering for the update list, and the foundations have been laid for more improvements in the future.
2016 — Publication.