Top all-time · #2356
www.PainScience.com
Personal blog · painscience.comhealthscience
www.PainScience.com is a personal blog at painscience.com about health and science. Since 2014, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 42 times, most often “Pain Science”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
What works? What doesn’t? Why? Rational, opinionated reviews of treatment options, and many handy tips. Strong pro-science bias.
Most-linked posts?
- Pain Science7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-12-28
- The Trouble with Chairs4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-01-20
- /tutorials/trigger-points.php3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-27
- Pain Is Weird3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-08-19
- A stretching habit isn’t doing much of what people hope2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-04-02
- /articles/ebm-vs-sbm.php2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-13
- Post-Exercise, Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-19
What Hacker News says?
I had some really nasty RSI a few years back. This website saved my career: https://www.painscience.com
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on “What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?”Submitted Google Update Tanks Traffic as a story · 144 points
HN discussionA scientifically minded approach to pain can be found at https://www.painscience.com/ No magic bullets, but perhaps something that can help. As for my two cents, I like trigger points. I have used that technique effectively for years to eliminate angry pain. While the science is apparently still questionable, it is a simple method (find some painfully acute spots somewhere around sources of pain and massage it for 2…
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on “Look, no hands”Submitted A stretching habit isn’t doing much of what people hope as a story · 36 points
HN discussionScience Based Medicine is a movement to improve Evidence Based Medicine with a stronger focus on scientifically rigorous evidence. It's not in opposition to EBM. To quote the SBM blog's about page: "Good science is the best and only way to determine which treatments and products are truly safe and effective. That idea is already formalized in a movement known as evidence-based medicine (EBM). EBM is a vital and posi…
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on “The FDA buries evidence of fraud in medical trials. My students and I dug it up”Submitted Sleep apnea and pain: not the clear link you'd think as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI do not want to minimize your experience either, as somebody suffering from chronic pain for the past two years myself. Chronic pain sensitizes you further, having this awareness helps you deal with your condition better. I highly recommend reading the following article. https://www.painscience.com/articles/pain-is-weird.php And as Dave Chappelle says - Got to find a way to find joy in your existence in spite of th…
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on “One in five Covid-19 patients develop mental illness within 90 days – study”Submitted Pain Science as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Just like the placebo effect causes real, very significant healing effects No, not really. https://www.painscience.com/articles/placebo-power-hype.php Edit: gee, apparently I hit a sensitive topic. I did not realize that Hacker News was so attached to a belief in such a strong placebo effect.
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on “My apartment was built on toxic waste”Submitted Less is more than enough: go to the gym less frequently but still gain strength as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlong those lines is this excellent website: https://www.painscience.com/
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on “Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain”Submitted The Trouble with Chairs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI suffered from chronic pain in all of my major joints - hips, lower back, knees, ankles and shoulders. I went to doctors who fobbed me off as not suffering enough to be worthy of examination. Egoscue's book was the only thing that described what I was going through. He describes how issues in one part of the body can have a knock-on effect on the rest of it. The exercises really helped relieve the pain for me. Afte…
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on “For back pain, the subtle moves of the Feldenkrais Method can help some people”Submitted Post-Exercise, Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor my fellow chronic lower back painers out there: over the course of many years I tried many things (always staying in the confines of modern medicine). There's certainly no magic bullet, but finally this book (which I have no financial incentives to promote) brought me a long lasting solution: https://www.painscience.com/tutorials/low-back-pain.php The whole thing certainly worths a read, since the goal of the bo…
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on “Novel mind-body program outperforms other treatments for chronic back pain”Submitted Pain Is Weird as a story · 2 points
HN discussionStretching is probably mostly hype. E.g., https://www.painscience.com/articles/stretching.php
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on “Ask HN: What did you learn the hard way?”Submitted Complete Guide to Tension Headaches as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.painscience.com/ Well written, thorough, and most of all... actually evidence based!
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on “Ask HN: Where do you go for learning about health and well-being?”Submitted Painscience.com – Detailed, evidence-based guides to common painful problems as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWow, It sound not like a new organ was discovered but that it been discovered that the fascia[1] have these tubes and that the fascia really is an organ. In studying message, a lot of approaches already treat the fascia as an active, responsive organ rather than as a passive collection of fibrous tissue. The science behind this has been considered murky at best. Now there, at least, is an explanation. The topic is d…
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on “Newly-discovered human organ may help explain how cancer spreads”Submitted The Pricing of Painscience.com E-Books as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSlight tangent: a few years ago it clicked for me how critical breath is in regulating the pH of the blood. The way you breath directly moderates the balance of oxygen vs. carbon dioxide in your blood, which on a basic level effects its pH. When you hear people talk about drinking alkaline water or eating alkalizing foods... the most direct thing you can do to effect your blood's pH is by learning different ways of…
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on “Ultra-Time-Efficient Exercise Lowers Blood Pressure, Boosts Brain Function”Submitted Post-Exercise, Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOpinions differ on that! It was thoroughly hashed out and tested. “SaveYourself” had over-promising and vague religious connotations that made many people uncomfortable (me included). PainScience.com was more appealing to the right audience. More about the rationale here: https://www.painscience.com/about-moving-to-painscience.php
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on “A domain move disaster”Submitted Pain Is Weird as a story · 1 points
HN discussionRelated or not, this is certainly against the "rules": https://www.painscience.com/donate-by-linking.php
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on “A domain move disaster”I recently stumbled on painscience.com blog. It is a great resource to understand pain and be able to live with it. https://www.painscience.com/articles/central-sensitization.p... Physical therapy involves a lot of proprioception retraining that is lost due to injury, surgery or inactivity. https://www.painscience.com/articles/sixth-sense.php
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on “Proprioception: The Silent “Sixth” Sense”You place a lot of trust in doctors. Knee arthroscopy is a good example where doctors knew for a fact that they were helping patients until we ran trials using sham surgery and we found out it doesn't help some patients at all. https://www.painscience.com/biblio/fascinating-landmark-stud... https://doctorskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/08/placebo-surgery-4... PBMs are probably bad, but we need some organisation to look at…
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on “Cancer patients are being denied drugs, even with prescriptions and insurance”Before you get too far into stretching, I'd consider how much you actually should stretch. There's been a lot of misinformation around stretching for a few decades now: https://www.painscience.com/articles/stretching.php
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on “Spaced repetition and practice”
