PainSci Updates

Instant strength is a staple of pop culture and fantasy: Popeye, Hulk, Asterix!

I’ve probably never met anyone with severe spinal stenosis who didn’t think it meant surgery, and the sooner the better.

My old friend Bex asked me recently about meralgia paresthetica, a common thigh-nerve predicament: “Super frustrating that it seems like such a common problem, but there’s basically no real info or support about it!”

Fibromyalgia is a regular guest star here: the common disease of widespread pain and fatigue, still unexplained.

PainScience.com is on a new server, and quite a lot faster: roughly 3× faster where it counts the most, like displaying member account pages and books.

It seems a little fishy to me that practically everyone who gets tested for obstructive sleep apnea ends up with a CPAP machine prescription.

“Your body’s natural painkillers” — AKA endorphins, endogenous opioids — is a cliché based on overconfident speculation about why treatments like massage, exercise, and acupuncture allegedly relieve pain.

For whatever it’s worth, most people do get more flexible when they stretch … but how does that work exactly?

I have published a batch of substantial corrections and clarifications in one of my oldest articles, the one about homeopathic creams for aches and pains, especially Traumeel (now T-Relief in the US and Canada), which contain several herbs but mostly feat…

Does finding a “trigger point” that recreates your pain at another location prove you’ve found the surprising source of that pain?

Or do you?

Ranzani et al. is the rare exercise study asking a genuinely well-aimed question: does adding load to back exercises buy anything over weight-free back exercise?

Remember that too-good-to-be-true study of Pain Reprocessing Therapy back in 2022?

Melatonin could plausibly help people with chronic musculoskeletal pain, presumably by improving sleep.

I have long been critical of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) — injections of your own concentrated blood, still supposedly “regenerative” despite piles of underwhelming evidence.

Someone once tried to defend reiki practitioners on my Facebook page, and I surprised some of my skeptical allies by standing up for her — not because I think reiki works, but because I don’t think the people who do reiki are “evil,” or even very different

And it sounds like good news, but I’m not so sure.

This post is about an actually good study of nature sounds for fibromyalgia — seriously!

[ Image caption: Scene of the crime?

A new trial from Taiwan with a respectable design and a believable result has compared platelet-rich plasma (PRP), corticosteroids (CS), and a saline placebo for shoulders in the agonizing freezing stage of frozen shoulder.

On the heels of another round of my stretch “negativity,” today I’m reporting on a new study (Støve et al.) that challenges my notorious anti-stretching bias, and offers fibromyalgia patients a smidgen of hope.

Recently I posted about how you can make a living by “telling the truth to people who want to hear it,” but you’ll go broke if you try that with people who don’t … and it’s hard to tell the difference.

Just a heads up that I have rewritten half of my recent post, “Stretching doesn’t always feel good.”

Every time I’ve ever published anything that undermines bad beliefs about stretching — and there are plenty of those to undermine — I get a fresh batch of reactions like this: “But stretching feels so good!”

Sometimes I feel like I am mostly earning a living from the customers I haven’t pissed off yet. 😜 This charmingly quotable wisdom nugget was recently shared by John Gruber, so you may well have come across it already, but it’s worth a look again while thi…

The injured always want to know why me?

People don’t limit themselves to merely believing that absurd but harmless quackeries are actually effective medicine: the human capacity for wishful thinking is so potent that countless people throughout history have sworn by dangerous snake oils even as…

Ineffective treatments are often prescribed long after being spanked by science.

I highlight a lot as I read, but rarely review what I’ve highlighted.

The last post, about pain duration, may have been badly corrupted as seen in your RSS reader, depending on when it was fetched.

People talk about pain intensity all the time, healthcare professionals ask about it, and studies focus on it.

Is a story about being “abused” at a chronic pain clinic believable?

People like to defend their favourite health and wellness practices by saying that “every little bit helps.”

Today I stumbled across two new scientific reviews of the same thing — cannabis for neuropathic pain — with different conclusions about more or less the same data.

Causality inference is a potent defining feature of human intelligence that serves us well in many situations.

If you want to improve your mood, go for a walk — because it can truly work — and maybe pass on the single-session interventions (“condensed CBT + more”) featured in my last post.

What if just one class could do roughly the same job as a full eight-session course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for chronic pain?

There is still no evidence that stretching will make you live longer, despite what you may have heard — even if you heard it from a trusted source.

We Bury The Dead [IMDb] is an arty, poignant … zombie film?