What’s New on PainScience.com?
New featured articles, updates to articles, recent blog posts, and noteworthy new scientific papers
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 242)
- Suffering, Disability & Pain » Nov 2025
- Bone on Bone » Jun 2024
- DMSO for Pain » Jun 2024
- Manual Therapy: What is it, and does it work? » Jan 2024
- The Phantom of Complex Compensatory Injuries » 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 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 21 articles & books in 168 days, breaking down into 21 major updates, 19 medium, 19 minor. That’s about every 2.8 days in recent history; there have been 1998 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. (an all-time rate of about every other day) … plus very roughly ten thousand more since the early 2000s. See the complete update archives.
showing of 60 recent updates
| L | Jul 10 | The Complete Guide to Neck Pain & Cricks — Rewritten — Rewritten and roughly tripled in size, this chapter now actually reviews the science of pillows for neck pain, such as it is: what a pillow can and cannot plausibly do, the sorry state of the evidence, and why comfort is really the only meaningful consideration. |
| S | Jul 7 | Why “Science”-Based Instead of “Evidence”-Based? — Revised the introduction with a quote that aptly summarizes how things have been working out with evidence-based medicine (not well). |
| S | Jul 2 | Does Platelet-Rich Plasma Injection Work? — Minimally updated with a drop-in citation to Hsieh et al. |
| S | Jul 2 | Complete Guide to Frozen Shoulder — Science update, steroids — Good news for steroids, bad news for PRP, from a new trial by Hsieh et al. |
| L | Jun 26 | Quite a Stretch — New section, stretching for fibromyalgia. |
| L | Jun 26 | A Rational Guide to Fibromyalgia — New section, stretching for fibromyalgia. |
| L | Jun 23 | Quite a Stretch — New section, stretching doesn’t always feel good — Major new exploration of an under-rated category of rare but notable stretching hazards for some people. |
| M | Jun 17 | The PainScience.com origin story — Brought the page up to date, added some colour. |
| L | Jun 13 | Achilles Tendinitis Treatment Science — New section, "What causes Achilles tendinitis? Why do some runners get it and others don’t?" Lots of nice reliable new insights, mostly thanks to a good new study (Jandacka). |
| L | Jun 9 | The Complete Guide to Neck Pain & Cricks — Major upgrade, introduction to treatment — A much more thorough introduction to treatment with thumbnail sketches of summaries of most treatment options. |
| M | Jun 8 | The Complete Guide to Low Back Pain — Revision, overview of treatments — Added a better overview of the minimally invasive treatments that are more drastic than the conservative options, but less than surgery (interventional pain medicine), along with a variety of other minor improvements. |
| M | Jun 6 | Popular but Weird & Dangerous Cures — Added the Thoreau quote (“no imposition is too great for the credulity of men”) and two new entries — vagina steaming and black salve — both conspicuously overdue contemporary examples. |
| L | Jun 5 | The Complete Guide to Neck Pain & Cricks — New section — The topic of epidural steroid injection is another member of the “interventional pain medicine” family and very closely related to the “block and burn” treatments discussed in other chapters. So for a long time this book just had light coverage of it along with those. But it is a distinct and common treatment, so it is particularly deserving of its own better-late-than-never chapter. And here it is at last — a major addition to the book. |
| L | Jun 5 | The Complete Guide to Low Back Pain — New section — The topic of epidural steroid injection is another member of the “interventional pain medicine” family and very closely related to the “block and burn” treatments discussed in other chapters. So for a long time this book just had light coverage of it along with those. But it is a distinct treatment … and extremely widely prescribed, so it is particularly deserving of its own better-late-than-never chapter. And here it is at last — a major addition to the book, about 3000 words. |
| L | May 29 | Objectivity is Overrated — Substantially rewritten on a whim. My creative attention was hijacked while adding the VanderMeer quote. So much for whatever else I was supposed to be doing this morning. |
| S | May 27 | A Rational Guide to Fibromyalgia — Key point added, introduction — Added information about the “character” of fibromyalgia pain, what makes it so discombobulating and bothersome. |
| L | May 12 | Many Pages — Another major under-the-hood upgrade: after twenty years of using a very weird, non-standard system for storing bibliographic data, I have finally cleaned that up and started using a modern and standard data storage system — putting an end to endless "well that's odd" moments while working. I knew the old bibliography engine like an old lover … that you cannot imagine living with ever again. It was fun while it lasted, but it was time to move on.The new way is faster, better in countless ways. |
| M | Apr 23 | The Power of Barking: Correlation, causation, and how we decide what treatments work — Numerous improvements to the discussion of causality inference. |
| L | Apr 23 | Many Pages — Upgraded the engine of PainScience.com to version 8.3 of the PHP programming language, after years of procrastinating and putting up with the limitations of version 7. The main immediate benefit of this upgrade is speed of some key features. The main long-term benefit is that it’s a big down-payment on “tech debt,” a term of art in the tech industry referring to the way big old projects get mired in old code. Even big businesses can sink like a dino in a tar pit. Like bankruptcy, tech debt suffocates projects “first slowly, then quickly.” In other words, I had to do this to keep the project going long term, and it was not a small or fun chore. But it is very satisfying to finally put it behind me! |
| S | Apr 6 | Tissue Provocation Therapies in Musculoskeletal Medicine — Editing and polishing. |
| S | Mar 31 | Does Massage Therapy Work? — New content, massage myths — Added “scar tissue can be scraped away” goals of scraping massage to the list of myths about massage. |
| S | Mar 31 | Does Massage Therapy Work? — New content, non-massage treatments — Added scraping massage to the list of pseudo-massage modalities. |
| M | Mar 24 | Mobilize! — New section: “Mobilizations as a great tool for body scans.” |
| L | Mar 17 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — New audiobook version — About a third of the chapters in the audiobook have now been replaced with fresh versions, following several waves of updates to chapters. |
| S | Mar 14 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Editing, steroids — An all-over light editing while recording a new audio version. |
| S | Mar 14 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Editing, placebo — A few minor improvements and one correction (I now know that it’s a bit of a myth that pill colour drives placebo). |
| M | Mar 14 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — More and better, introduction to treatment — Added some missing summaries of treatments, cleaned up some others, and quite a bit of general revision and modernizing. |
| S | Mar 13 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science updated, joint noise — Updated the chapter with a discussion of Serighelli et al., who reported a correlation between hip joint noise and trouble. |
| S | Mar 9 | Cramps, Spasms, Tremors & Twitches — Added a footnote about a possible association between cramping and sleep apnea. |
| S | Mar 9 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Editing, implications of a “new” surgical option — Cleaned up and modernized for new audio version. |
| M | Mar 7 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, new surgery — Cleaned up the chapter a bit and added a new citation to a case series of surgeries combining both old and new approaches (Arnal-Burró). |
| M | Mar 4 | Achilles Tendinitis Treatment Science — Added new citations and information about drug-induced tendinopathy and physiological vulnerability to loading. |
| L | Mar 3 | The Complete Guide to Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome — New chapter. |
| L | Mar 3 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — New chapter. |
| S | Feb 24 | Quite a Stretch — Added nuance, introduction — Added minor but overdue note about opportunity cost and how “every little bit helps” is often wrong. Also added a curious anecdote about a reader who thinks stretch does not feel good for anyone. |
| S | Feb 24 | Pain is Weird — Revision warning, intro — Added a caveat that this article is awaiting revision because it “has slowly fallen out of sync with my values and knowledge.” |
| M | Feb 19 | Quite a Stretch — Science update, intro to stretching science — Cited Warneke et al. for broad general support for the thesis of this article. |
| M | Feb 14 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, physiological vulnerability — A same-day update as the re-write of this chapter, but logged seperately because it was very much its own thing, complementary but seperate: a drop-in citation based on a lot of analysis of Yao. Click through to the bib page for the details on that paper. |
| L | Feb 14 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Rewrite, physiological vulnerability — Total revision of this chapter. It still discusses “failed healing” like the original, but almost everything else is different. Before: a minor chapter musing about some of the more medically mysterious cases. After: a substantial, evidence-based chaper that sheds some genuine light on the problem. |
| M | Feb 13 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, orthotics — Added a citation to Sanchez-Gomez et al., justifying a recommendation to at least consider orthotics to limit supination. |
| S | Feb 13 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, dysfunctional TFL — Added a citation to Sanchez-Gomez et al., as a good fresh example of very weak science about the role of the TFL in IT band syndrome. |
| M | Feb 13 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, introduction — Cited He et al. on the state and history of ITBS research, and the most cited papers; Taunton et al. and Marais et al. on prevalence. |
| M | Feb 12 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, ITBS surgery — Added a discussion of ITBS induced by surgery, with a couple relevant new citations. Also added a citation to Manon on IT band microanatomy and its layering and fibre directions. General polish and editing. |
| S | Feb 12 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, IT band and knee anatomy — Cited Manon on the IT band microstructure (a cool study). |
| S | Feb 12 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Editing, friction/tightness intro. |
| M | Feb 11 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, post-surgical ITBS — Cited Takagi et al., a very illuminating paper about four case studies of ITBS after knee replacement. |
| M | Feb 10 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science updated, hip strengthening — Filled in an old blank, a much-cited 2010 paper by Powers that should have been here since at least 2015 just because it was so popular. And now it is, better late than never. I also added a much fresher citation to Leppänen et al., which is actually more important, and I'll probably make more of a meal of it soon. But for now it is acknowledged as a scientific point against my own bias on this topic. |
| M | Feb 10 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science updated, hip strengthening — Added big footnotes for Yao, a good example of very fancy-but-bad research (trying to make the case for hip weakness as a cause of ITBS); and Jahanshahi, another good example of a bad study (of functional motor control exercises). |
| M | Feb 10 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, running pace and IT band pain — Cited and discussed two experiments showing reduced knee loading with shorter, quicker steps. |
| L | Feb 10 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Science update, IT band and knee anatomy — Cited Claes on the re-discovery of the “anterolateral ligament” in 2013. |
| M | Feb 9 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Editing, hip and thigh pain — Quite a few improvements to the text while recording a fresh audio version. |
| S | Feb 7 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Editing, patellar misalignment — Minor improvements to clarity. Checked to see if there were relevant new citations since ~2010, and confirmed that there still aren’t — which is kind of amazing. |
| S | Feb 7 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — Editing, inflammation myth — Minor improvements to the text while recording a fresh audio version. |
| S | Feb 7 | The Complete Guide to IT Band Syndrome — New book cover — Not a substantive update, obviously — but needful and overdue nevertheless. However, it’s just the first of a wave of more content-oriented updates coming in mid-February. |
| L | Feb 4 | Sneaky soft-tissue fragility — Added “Does caution with pressure solve this problem?” Added a sidebar about criticism of the article. Added Ehlers–Danlos syndrome into the summary (it’s an especially important example, and it’s not just “hypermobility”). Revised the clinical recommendations at the end of the intro. |
| M | Feb 3 | Sneaky soft-tissue fragility — Added a disclaimer that “not all strong massage is harmful” disclaimer, but clarified that “there is probably more potential for harm than most people suspect.” Small but important. |
| L | Feb 2 | Sneaky soft-tissue fragility — Added audio version. Many minor improvements along the way, because reading always reveals plenty of issues. 😜 |
| L | Feb 1 | Sneaky soft-tissue fragility — Added new section: “If some people are more fragile, does this mean that they are more vulnerable to things like ‘tech neck’ and other postural bogeymen?” |
| L | Jan 31 | Sneaky soft-tissue fragility — Added new section: “Chronic pain itself is a kind of fragility” |
| L | Jan 30 | Sneaky soft-tissue fragility — Added new section: “Not just bruising! What happens to fragile tissues that are massaged too aggressively? More and worse than you probably think!” |
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 1348 posts dating back to 2010.
- City noise pollution may aggravate pain (and nature sounds don’t help) 🔈 » Jul 17, 26
- Pillow talk: the evidence about pillows and neck pain is soft 🔈 » Jul 11, 26
- Freezing shoulders enjoy steroids, PRP not so much » Jul 2, 26
- Stretching for fibromyalgia: abstract versus full text » Jun 25, 26
- Fresh example of “going broke telling the truth to people want to be lied to” » Jun 24, 26
- Updated: “Stretch doesn’t always feel good” » Jun 23, 26
- Stretching doesn’t always feel good 🔈 » Jun 19, 26
- Making a living by telling the truth to those who want it (if you can find them) » Jun 16, 26
- The kind of running injury risk science we’re always waiting for 🔈 » Jun 12, 26
- No imposition is too great for the credulity of men » Jun 6, 26
- Enough with the gratuitous spinal steroid injections already (Member Post) 🔈 » Jun 3, 26
- A self-immolating desire for the truth » May 29, 26
- Mild pain that never ends isn’t actually mild » May 26, 26
- Pain rehab’s patient-blaming problem » May 16, 26
- Every little bit helps? The opportunity cost thing » May 6, 26
- Two new reviews of cannabis for neuropathic pain 🔈 » Apr 30, 26
- Actually, correlation kinda does imply causation 🔈 » Apr 23, 26
- Exercise actually moves the mental health needle » Apr 17, 26
- One class to rule them all? Single-session pain interventions 🔈 » Apr 14, 26
- Stretching and mortality, correlation and causation » Apr 4, 26
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, ~850 of them more substantively annotated.
- The effect of a novel core stabilization technique on managing patients with chronic low back pain: a randomized, controlled, experimenter-blinded study. You et al., 2014, Clin Rehabil. » added Jun 2026
- Effect of core stability exercises on feed-forward activation of deep abdominal muscles in chronic low back pain: a randomized controlled trial. Vasseljen et al., 2012, Spine (Phila Pa 1976). » added Jun 2026
- Randomized controlled trial of specific spinal stabilization exercises and conventional physiotherapy for recurrent low back pain. Cairns et al., 2006, Spine (Phila Pa 1976). » added Jun 2026
- Dose-response-relationship of stabilisation exercises in patients with chronic non-specific low back pain: a systematic review with meta-regression. Mueller et al., 2020, Sci Rep. » added Jun 2026
- Trajectories of pain and cognitive function: 22 years of evidence in mid-to-later life. Andres et al., 2026, Pain. » added Jun 2026
- The impact of everyday acoustic environments on chronic pain mechanisms in fibromyalgia: a randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled 4 × 4 crossover trial. Gungormus et al., 2026, Pain. » added Jun 2026
- Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain: 5-Year Follow-Up of a Randomized Clinical Trial. Ashar et al., 2025, JAMA Psychiatry. » added Jun 2026
- Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) or Opioid Analgesia Added to Ibuprofen for Children's Musculoskeletal Injury: Two Randomized Clinical Trials. Ali et al., 2026, JAMA. » added Jun 2026
- Reframing nociplastic pain research and treatment using post-traumatic stress disorder-inspired conceptual models. Coulombe-Leveque et al., 2026, Pain. » added Jun 2026
- Long-Term Effects of Repeated Injections of Local Anesthetic With or Without Corticosteroid for Lumbar Spinal Stenosis: A Randomized Trial. Friedly et al., 2017, Arch Phys Med Rehabil. » added Jun 2026
- Beyond pain intensity: Validating single-item pain bothersomeness measures. Edwards et al., 2025, J Pain. » added May 2026
- Assessment of pain intensity using summed pain intensity difference (SPID) in orthopedic operative patients. Chukka et al., 2025, Afr Health Sci. » added May 2026
- Effect of pillow on pain, disability and sleep quality in patients with chronic neck pain: A systematic review. Ghosh et al., 2025, Rehabilitacion (Madr). » added May 2026
- Cannabis-Based Treatment for Neuropathic Pain: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Mitchell et al., 2026, The Journal of Pain. » added Apr 2026
- Cannabis-based medicines for chronic neuropathic pain in adults. Ateş et al., 2026, Cochrane Database Syst Rev. » added Apr 2026
- Exercise training and depression and anxiety in musculoskeletal pain patients: a meta-analysis of randomized control trials. Amiri et al., 2023, Neuropsychiatr. » added Apr 2026
- Schwann cell Lrp1 deletion drives trigeminal neuron sensitization and orofacial pain by modulating mitochondrial function and TRPV1/TRPA1 activity. Gong et al., 2025, J Headache Pain. » added Apr 2026
- Effect of exercise on depression and anxiety symptoms: systematic umbrella review with meta-meta-analysis. Munro et al., 2026, Br J Sports Med. » added Apr 2026
- The effectiveness of instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilization on pain and function in patients with musculoskeletal disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Tang et al., 2025, BMC Musculoskelet Disord. » added Mar 2026
- Knee osteoarthritis in the intact- and amputation-side knees of UK military personnel and veterans with traumatic unilateral transtibial limb loss 8- and 11-years post-injury: the ADVANCE cohort. Watson et al., 2026, Arch Phys Med Rehabil. » added Mar 2026
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.