Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com)

Highlights, updates, and skeptical snark from publisher Paul Ingraham. The salamander symbolizes healing & legit biological marvels.

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

⚠️ “Trolls climbing up my spine with ice axes!”
⚠️ “A ball of needles stabbing me with every breath!”
⚠️ “The ground I’m walking on is made of spears!”

Real “intrusive mental imagery” in people with #chronicpain. Got your own IMIs? 😜 I sure do!

https://t.co/zykgisy5ob

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

@thefizzeo Always and forever, yep. 🙂

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

An immense new review of exercise for pain has landed. It sounds like good news … but I am not so sure. After just a little a cynical adjustment, there might not be much left of the result, which isn’t exactly huge to begin with.

NEW POST, 2-min read: https://t.co/0C5qq0SHYx

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

@thefizzeo Sure, analogous. Most people still assume you MUST exercise to lose weight… but it doesn't actually work very well at all. It mostly just stimulates appetites, and it’s absurdly easier to consume calories than it is to burn them. That what you had in mind?

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

@PsychoMechanics 🙂 And sometimes I turn to really intense EDM as my preferred sound-therapy. Surprisingly often, actually …

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

“Nature sounds are good for pain” is a thing people just WANT to believe, to hell with the evidence. But an actually good new study does NOT support prescriptions of birdsong for #fibromyalgia. Nature sounds were actually a bit WORSE than silence. 🤯

https://t.co/b0C9l4MKPl

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

This comic is satire — but only slightly sillier than some real pillow marketing.

NEW POST today, all about what pillows can and cannot do for neck and shoulder pain (and how bloody awful the "science" on this topic is)…

https://t.co/gjABGQU0QT

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

I liked this result — because I am a skeptic about PRP — but I try to blunt my bias and look at the study as a PRP proponent would.

Click through to the full post for some of the nerdy details, a couple more minutes reading:

https://t.co/WKBz6H6EVZ

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

Frozen shoulders like steroids…PRP not so much!

New trial from Taiwan, respectable design, believable result, comparing platelet-rich plasma (PRP), corticosteroids (CS), and a saline placebo for shoulders in the agonizing FREEZING stage of frozen shoulder.

What happened?

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

Steroids won handily, and that’s worth knowing, but I see this study as more of a bad news story for PRP than good news for steroids.

Fashionable, fancy PRP couldn’t even outperform saline! 😕

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

PMID 41505155. Here's the paper in the PainSci bibliography:

https://t.co/g4Exp9apiY

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

Ibuprofen just barely works for kids in acute pain from injuries…and adding acetaminophen or an opioid doesn’t help. 😮 In any combo, they’re all in modest “takes the edge off” territory, less than a couple points on 10-scale.

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

As reported by Ali et al., based on a couple new well-blinded randomized controlled trials. The study used only single doses, so ongoing pain management at home could be better.

Also: Hydromorphone had 4× the mild adverse effects with hydromorphone (mostly nausea, dizziness).

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

#Stretching for #fibromyalgia: abstract versus full text! The abstract for Støve et al. makes it sound like stretching eased fibromyalgia symptoms…but the full text reveals a study so warped it backfires and actually suggests no effect at all. 🙄 Details: https://t.co/aSvXHoNIKD

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

Now that's some demure and mindful watermelon eating. My vote for best comment? "Find someone who looks at you the way Reggie looks at watermelon." 🤣

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

This is Reggie. He wanted to show you how he eats watermelon. 14/10 thank you Reggie

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

@Matthew_Rupiper 🎯 Yep. It’s well understood that waitlist controls are garbage, and yet we see them constantly. Should be unfundable, unpublishable. Until it is, it'll continue to be systematically exploited by amateur researchers to inflate results that support pet theories and modalities.

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

NEW POST: "Stretching for fibromyalgia? Abstract versus full text." 2-min read.

https://t.co/Kptgaa0X2n

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

Study says just 6m of daily home stretching for 6 weeks reduced #fibromyalgia symptoms by ~18%. Not quite “huge” if true, but good, cheap, no major flaws in the abstract, so…should I put that in my anti-stretching pipe and smoke it?

Not today. 😏 My bias is safe from this junk.

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

@TrainingInNYC Mel! That guy really knew his stuff.

Thanks for plugging the article. 🙂

[Paul Ingraham (PainScience.com) @PainSci]

“Stretching doesn’t always feel good” topic now blended into my huge stretching article (or small book), which makes the scientific case that stretching is NOT a “pillar of fitness.”

I get a lot of hate mail about it. For 20 years now. 😜

https://t.co/TzoUGNpD9o