Articles Index

There are thousands of low back pain books — what’s special about this one? The problem is that 90% of doctors and therapists assume that back pain is structural, in spite of mountains of scientific evidence showing … exactly the opposite. Only a few medical experts understand this, and fewer still are writing for patients and therapists. Supported by 373 footnotes, this tutorial is the most credible and clarifying low back pain information you can find. Ships with a free copy of PainScience.com’s trigger point tutorial!

Headaches are one of the top 10 most disabling conditions and tension headaches afflict almost half of all people. This article compares tension hadaches to migraines and other kinds of headaches in detail. (Safety first: unusually severe, persistent, sudden, or strange headaches need medical investigation.) Headaches have dozens of major causes and complications but “simple” tension headaches are strongly associated with stress, fatigue, and neck pain, and are usually caused by pain radiating from sensitive structures in the neck, face, jaw, and scalp, especially the suboccipital muscle group — self-massage in this “perfect spot” is the most neglected easy treatment option. Others include relaxation, insomnia treatment, heat and ice, breathing exercises, and both general and specific exercise (especially neck strength training). Vision correction is sometimes an overlooked opportunity. There are some over-rated treatment ideas: dehydration is often suspected but trivial and easy to fix; poor posture probably doesn’t matter much and it’s hard to fix (although a few ergonomic factors can be important); the evidence on chiropractic therapy (spinal manipulation) is discouraging; pain-killers barely work, and even backfire with chronic use (analgesic rebound). Botox injection is an exotic and sketchy option, but possibly worth pursuing for serious chronic cases.

Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) tries to treat pain by passing alternating current through superficial tissues causing tingling sensations, with brief and minor benefits that are probably just a “sensation-enhanced” placebo. It has been a therapeutic staple in physical therapy and chronic pain clinics for decades, and there are many consumer TENS gadgets. They are safe and fairly cheap at about $100 for a typical unit.

It’s not as scientific as it seems, but it may not be useless either: interesting sensations can always get something done when presented in the right way to patients. The tingling and vibrating might “drown out” pain, “distract” the nervous system from it, or get the brain to “reconsider” pain. It’s remotely possible that TENS stimulates actual tissue behaviour change (healing) and not just sensation. In theory, the right setting could make all the difference, which makes the topic endlessly debatable, even though most TENS obviously doesn’t work many miracles.

TENS has always also been seen as a form of relaxation therapy, similar to a vibrating massager, but it’s probably a minor effect. It doesn’t seem to be able to prevent (for instance) jaw muscle clencing in TMJ syndrome.

There’s not much scientific evidence that TENS helps pain and it’s surprisingly well-studied as these things go (much better than ultrasound, oddly). As of 2016, there are five disappointingly non-positive reviews, two spankings of TENS for for back pain and osteoarthritis, and just one positive review (also the oldest). Despite this, some experts remain remain optimistic that the right TENS for the right kind of pain could still be good medicine.

There are many other electrotherapies. Electrical muscle stimulation (instead of nerve) might help keep muscles fit during rehab from injuries, but it’s probably no better than just clenching muscles yourself. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy (PEMF) is a fascinating cousin of TENS that seems to actually directly stimulate cellular repair, and is an evidence-based method of speeding up fracture healing; it probably has other uses, but none have been confirmed yet. Central nervous system stimulation using surgically implanted electrodes is basically “deep TENS,” and is an area of active research. Old-timey galvanic baths were an old-timey whole body direct current stimulation, “spasm baths” with no clear purpose. People do seem like to like shocking themselves!

Frozen shoulder (adhesive capsulitis) is a common, disabling, painful loss of shoulder movement. Fortunately, frozen shoulders usually thaw, but it can take months or even years. There are three typical stages: freezing, frozen, and slow thawing. The cause is a mystery, and it’s one of the oddest of all musculoskeletal problems, because it occurs much more frequently in people with autoimmune diseases like diabetes — or just when your shoulder is immobilized for too long, an underuse injury (instead of the much more common overuse injury). The joint is clearly mechanically stuck in many patients, but it’s also possible it also becomes neurologically shut down. Although usually easy to diagnose, it does often get confused with other conditions, and most treatments are controversial, and vary with the stage of the condition. Surgical options include ripping or cutting the adhesions, but only make sense for the worst cases. The usual non-surgical treatments include pain-killers and steroid (oral or injected), exercise, manipulations, and blowing the joint capsule up like a balloon. Massage may be helpful in some cases, and there’s some hope that anti-inflammatory nutrition might be useful. Operative options include manipulation under anaesthesia and arthroscopic release and are generally reserved for refractory cases.

Who hasn’t had a crick in the neck? This tutorial isn’t the last word on this surprisingly complex subject, but it is a detailed, sensible and scientific survey of what makes a neck crick tick — and your treatment options. Ideal for any frustrated patient with a jammed cervical spine, it’s also helpful for many a therapist not really sure how to treat this quirky phenomenon. Ships with a free bonus, PainScience.com’s valuable trigger point tutorial!

The idea of “adjusting” the spine refers to many different manual therapies that wiggle, pop and otherwise manipulate spinal joints. The correct umbrella term for these treatments is “spinal manipulative therapy” or SMT. Expert opinions on SMT range widely, with some prominent medical scientists expressing strong concern and skepticism. Its provenance in chiropractic subluxation theory is dubious, its benefits are minor at best, and yet there are serious risks, even including paralysis and death in the case of SMT for the joints of the neck.

Despite all the controversy, there has been little high quality scientific research to determine whether or not SMT is safe and really works. Major science reviews have either been thoroughly discouraging. Thus, SMT fails the “impress me” test — it can’t possibly be working any miracles.

And yet spinal joint popping in particular is something that people crave, and most clinicians believe that some forms of SMT can be helpful to some of their patients, some of the time. There seems to be almost no doubt that there is something of therapeutic interest going on in SMT, at least some of the time.

Ultrasound therapy is the use of sound waves to treat medical problems, especially musculoskeletal problems like inflammation from injuries (sprains, tendinitis, bursitis). It has been a popular therapy for decades, its use so widespread that it almost defines physical therapy. Unfortunately, although mainstream, it is not as scientific a treatment as most people assume. It has been condemned or, at best, damned with faint praise by one scientific review after another for a quarter century. Authors had almost nothing good to say about ultrasound. Conclusions like this one (from van der Windt et al) are the rule: “As yet, there seems to be little evidence to support the use of ultrasound therapy in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders.” Some modern variants of ultrasound are expensive, hyped, and totally unproven for any or many conditions.

There is no clear justification for painfully intense “deep tissue” massage, and it’s actually hazardous to many patients, but the pressure question is greatly complicated by the fascinating paradox of “good” pain, wildly varied patient pain tolerance and preferences (often timidly repressed), and popular faith in the “no pain, no gain” principle.

“Good pain” is at the heart of the pressure question: a strange, potent sensory paradox that many people actually seek out as the goal of therapy, consciously or unconciously. Either it isn’t literally painful (just intense), or it’s painful but desired anyway because of relief or belief: an actual biological relief or at least the belief that there is one. But it’s important to note that not all satisfying, relieving sensations are genuinely helpful (e.g. scratching a mosquito bite).

“Bad pain” is unpleasant but manageable and probably safe — tolerate it cautiously, to a point.

“Ugly pain” is dangerous both physically and neurologically, causing a “fight or flight” reaction — always avoid it.

People do have clear pressure preferences: they often fire massage therapists who give treatments that are too painful or too fluffy. Pressure that’s fine for you may cause severe pain, emotional distress, “sensory injury” (sensitization) in others, or even physical injury, so pressure should be customized but often isn’t. Brutal massages might be appreciated or even helpful, but most people can’t tell the difference between the kind of pain that might be a necessary part of therapy, and ugly pain that is just abusive and dangerous.

Some possible justifications for painfully intense massage (these aren’t endorsements) include the destruction of motor end plates to “de-activate” trigger points; somatoemotional release (pain often strongly “resonates” with strong emotions like grief); moving tissue fluids; or just creating a strong, novel sensory experiences (which may have many subtle benefits).

Myofascial trigger points — muscle knots — are increasingly recognized by all health professionals as the cause of most of the world’s aches and pains. This detailed tutorial focuses on advanced troubleshooting for patients who have failed to get relief from basic tactics, but it’s also ideal for starting beginners on the right foot, and for pros who need to stay current. 176 sections grounded in the famous texts of Drs. Travell & Simons, as well as more recent science, this constantly updated tutorial is also offered as a free bonus (2-for-1) with the low back, neck, muscle strain, or iliotibial pain tutorials.

Many nutritional supplements, are taken like drugs as a treatment for muscles and joints and aches and pains: the “nutraceuticals,” like glucosamine, chondroitin sulfate, and bromelain. Unfortunately, many of them make little or no sense even in principle, and modern supplement research has been extremely disappointing and even ominous, due to the discovery of risks and serious problems with quality control in a virtually unregulated industry that is just as profitable as “Big Pharma,” and even more corrupt by most measures (even just on the basis of the massive involvement multi-level marketing, a fundamentally fraudulent business model).

Glucosamine is the most popular supplement, and has been slammed by large, decisively negative trials. Chondroitin has fared no better. Only one of the popular nutraceuticals, creatine, is quite a clear winner — but it’s main benefit is muscle fatigue resistance, which may not have anything to do with pain. There are still decent rays of hope for Vitamin D, curcumin, and a few others might be worth experimenting with for some kinds of problems, like magnesium for fibromyalgia. But the bottom line is that there is not a single supplement that is clearly beneficial for any common kind of pain.

Morning back pain is rarely serious and most of it is probably caused by low-grade inflammation which ramps up with age and is notoriously worse at the start of the day. The back may be one of the most vulnerable areas both to the “inflammaging” and to mild strains from awkward sleeping postures, which are the most obvious and underestimated factor in back pain.

There are some possible pathological causes. Trigger points are poorly understood sensitive spots, common in the back muscles that may be caused by awkward sleeping positions. Fibromyalgia also seems to have a thing for both backs and mornings. The main serious (but rare) cause of morning back pain is “inflammatory back pain,” and is more likely to be severe and actually wake you up. Finally, nocturnal disc swelling often gets the blame, but it shouldn’t—too speculative.

Treating inflammaging is difficult or impossible, but there are worthwhile anti-inflammatory strategies such as a heart-healthy diet, reducing anxiety, better sleep, and avoidance of exercise and metabolic extremes — all of which is also surprisingly similar to how fibromyalgia is treated. Trigger points may yield to simple self-massage with a ball. Improving sleep posture boils down to doing your best to stay in a “neutral” position, and particularly avoiding face down sleeping. There is no best mattress for back pain except, perhaps, just a good quality new one.

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), AKA “muscle fever,” is the muscle pain and weakness that starts up to a day after unfamiliar exercise, peaking up to two days later. The strongest trigger is a lot of eccentric contraction (e.g. quadriceps while descending). DOMS is much weaker after the next workout, but the first bout can be so fierce that people avoid starting valuable exercise programs, especially strength training. It’s worse for some people due to genetic factors and other biological stresses (especially sleep trouble).

Medical science can’t explain DOMS, let alone treat it. Many athletes believe that massage helps, but that’s not what the evidence shows. And many take ibuprofen as prevention, but that doesn’t work either. Drugs will only take the edge off the pain. The only promising treatments are heat and Indian food (curcumin), but not confirmed. Excessive DOMS may also be a symptom of other health problems, some of which can be treated, most notably vitamin D deficiency and insomnia.

DOMS is probably not caused by micro-trauma — a popular old idea — although it might be a mild form of “rhabdomyolysis,” which is caused by mucle proteins spilling into the blood. Some kind of “metabolic stress” may be a more likely culprit, and yet there is no clear link between DOMS and any specific biological marker (and definitely not lactic acid). There are even clues that DOMS is neurological. And it appears not to be inflammatory: evidence suggests that inflammation is actually what reduces DOMS as you continue to exercise. Mysterious indeed!

Homeopathy is a 200-year-old medical philosophy that has been thoroughly debunked, and survives today thanks to wishful thinking, ignorance, and because it is too useless to be very dangerous. It is the flagship in the alternative medicine fleet: the most profitable, absurd, and snakey of all snake oils.

Most people have no idea just how strange homeopathy is. The deal-breaker for many consumers is the discovery that it’s not just an “herbal” or “natural” remedy, but a “magical” one, based on a principle that reeks of flaky physics and old-timey snake oil flamboyance—much farther out in left field than herbs. Some people, of course, are quite happy citing quantum physics to explain alternative medicine, but you really have to be a card-carrying new age sort to go there. For most people, that crosses a line.

But they have to find out first! Fortunately, doctors, scientists and skeptics are unanimously and harshly critical of homeopathy, and have published many good quality critical reviews. For instance, see my own article about homeopathic arnica — the most popular of all homeopathic products, intended to treat inflammatory pain.

Homeopathic (diluted) herbal ointments featuring Arnica are supposedly good medicine for muscle pain, joint pain, sports injuries and bruises, but their effectiveness has been questioned by many experts. Known to most customers as “herbal” scream, most contain less than 10 micrograms of actual arnica per dose — much less that what’s needed for most substances to be considered a chemically active ingredient. Homeopathy is based on a fanciful interpretation of physics that involves ingredients having medicinal effects even after being diluted to the point of actually removing any trace of them. Some of the herbal ingredients are less diluted and may be chemically active and more useful.

A few tests of homeopathic pain creams have been slightly encouraging, but only the poorer quality ones. In all good quality, modern scientific trials so far, they do no better than a placebo. It is still possible that a benefit might be proven, but it is quite unlikely.

Therapeutic massage is expensive but popular and pleasant, with obvious subjective value, and proven benefit for anxiety and depression… but no other clear biological or medical effects. Most notably, the evidence that massage can help back and neck pain is sketchy, and there is no reason to believe that massage can help much with any other common musculoskeletal pain problem.

Training and certification standards for massage therapists are all over the map, and most practitioners have barely scratched the surface of musculoskeletal medicine. The profession is rife with pseudoscience like crank theories about the causes of pain, the myth that massage detoxifies, or that painfully “deep tissue” massage is needed to “release” tissues (which is stressful or even harmful for many patients).

And yet some medical benefits are plausible despite the lack of evidence. For instance, many apparently successful treatments may be due to the effects of pressure on “muscle knots,” which are a likely factor in many common pain problems, but poorly understood (and difficult to treat). And regardless, the effects on mood and mental health are so profound that patients can’t really lose — it’s a valuable service whether it “works” for pain or not.

“Structuralism” is the excessive focus in the physical therapies on crookedness or “mechanical” problems in the body — what I call the biomechanical bogeymen. It is the source of much bogus diagnosis — things like tilted pelvises, short legs, abnormal spinal curvatures, or “misaligned” anything — and the cause of much therapeutic barking up the wrong tree. Such factors are much less important than many people still believe.

Structuralism has been challenged by many medical researchers and experts like Dr. Lorimer Moseley Moseley, Dr. Scott Dye (knee surgeon); or back experts Drs. Richard Deyo, John Sarno, and Nickolai Bogduk; soft tissue pain experts like the late Dr. Janet Travell, Drs. David Simons and Seigfried Mense (see Muscle Pain), or Dr. Chann Gunn, and on and on.

Many key scientific studies over the years have undermined major structuralist assumptions, like Finan’s finding that knee pain correlates more with pain sensitivity than arthritis; Grundy’s conclusion in Lancet that short leg length differences don’t correlate with back pain; or Grob’s findings that abnormal neck curvatures do not predict neck pain; or Moseley’s finding that a placebo for knee osteoarthritis is just as good as real surgery; or numerous MRI studies showing terrible correlation between structural problems and back pain (see Boden, Jensen, Weishaupt, Stadnik, Borenstein); or the astonishing finding by Haig that even narrowing of the spinal canal does not necessarily cause stenotic back pain; or the clear evidence that even dislocation of the upper cervical spine is often asymptomatic (Swinkels); and so on (and on and on).

Globus pharyngeus is the sensation of a lump in the throat in the absence of any physical obstruction in the throat, often considered psychosomatic. It’s common and may just be a minor sensory anomaly, like tinnitus. For a sensory phantom, globus can be serious bully, interfering with swallowing and even breathing in the worst cases, and usually causing serious anxiety about the possibility of scary causes like cancer. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to confidently rule out a physical cause in the short term.

Globus probably is “all in your head,” unless it isn’t. Unfortunately, the diagnostic challenge of is immense. Many subtle or obscure problems can be at the root of it, but some globus sufferers eventually get answers and relief from the discovery of causes like tonsil stones (in my own case), acid reflux, minor injuries to pharyngeal stuctures, Eagle syndrome, cysts and cervical osteophytes, and other miscellaneous anatomical abnormalities, mostly minor — anything that irritates the throat, probably.

“Modality empire” is my own term for an ego-driven proprietary method or mode of manual therapy — a sub-discipline — championed and promoted by a single charismatic entrepreneur. Most of the “emperors” have healer syndrome, lack humility, make big promises, and make their money from unusually expensive therapy, workshops and books. Professionals are sold on the opportunity to purchase credibility in the form of increasing “levels” of certification, but the quality of these certifications is completely unregulated and often dubious. A modality empire is as much a business model as a method of helping people, and many are quite unoriginal, just branding old ideas for a new generation of workshop consumers. Obviously there is a lot of overlap between modality empires and quackery, but (just as obviously) they aren’t all bad.

The chiropractic profession has a long history of scientific and ethical controversies swirling around it. Why is chiropractic perpetually contentious?

• Aggressive marketing, especially unethical pre-paid treatment packages and other forms of over-treatment, even of children and babies.
• The original “big idea” of chiropractic, still alive and well, is that nearly any health problem can be cured by spinal manipulation — an extravagantly too-good-to-be-true promise.
• Doubts about the efficacy of treating even just ordinary neck and back pain, plus particularly serious concerns about the safety of neck manipulation.

Many chiropractors share these concerns. The profession is strongly divided between progressives and traditionalists — and it’s hard for patients to know which is which. But at the centre of all the controversy is a service that many people are happy to pay for: a spinal joint “pop” can be super satisfying, like “scratching an itch you can’t reach.” Whatever explains this and whether its medically meaningful or not, I believe it’s the true source of chiropractic’s viability as a business.

Acupuncture is the poster child of alternative medicine: charismatically exotic but less absurd than homeopathy, and heavily researched, people assume there “must be something to it,” including many skeptics until surprisingly recently. But acupuncture gets its support only from junky science, while all the good tests show that it’s no better than a placebo, for pain or anything else. This has been conceded even by many acupuncture researchers (although they bizarrely try to spin it as good news). Even NCCAM admits that acupuncture “works no better than a sham treatment at easing symptoms like pain and fatigue.”

We shouldn’t be surprised: acupuncture’s popularity comes from easily debunked myths and propaganda, and it’s based on a “vitalism,” a naive belief in an undetectable energy system in biology (like the Force, from Star Wars). It is not based on ancient Chinese wisdom, but a surprisingly modern invention. And Traditional Chinese medicine was never “wise”: it’s a patchwork of superstition, habit, and guesswork. Acupuncture is not and never has been used for anaesthesia (journalist James Reston did not, by his own account, contrary to legend); its use for that purpose was grossly exaggerated for political reasons during the Cultural Revolution. Finally, acupuncture isn’t even safe: aseptic technique (disinfectant, gloves) is often poor, and infections can and do happen.

Acupuncture’s glory days are over. It is supported only by ideologues and the uninformed. More study is not needed.

Plantar fasciitis is a stubborn pain in the arch of the foot. Yet scientists have proven that certain treatments are effective for most patients — so why don’t more professionals recommend them? Much of the science is new, and old myths die hard. This tutorial debunks the myths and reviews of all the common treatment options. Incredibly detailed, 52 sections in all, and thoroughly referenced.

Do you know why your shins hurt? Shin splints are often not what they seem. With several possible underlying problems, patients often end up barking up the wrong tree. There are four very different types of shin pain. This tutorial breaks it down for you and goes through all the treatment options and recent science. About 20 times more information about shin splints in one place than you can get anywhere else. Ships with a free copy of PainScience.com’s trigger point tutorial!

Difficulty breathing is a common complaint and a tough diagnostic challenge, and there are some serious causes to be aware of. However, the great majority of mild and moderate cases, and even a few more serious ones, are probably caused by minor muscle knots (trigger points), respiratory dysfunction, and/or anxiety: all of which are relatively simple and cheap problems to try to self-treat. Relief may even be surprisingly easy for some patients. It’s safe and cheap to experiment with self-massage for muscular trigger points. Although changing bad habit is always tricky, respiratory strength training is an effective and worthwhile fitness activity in itself. And learning better anxiety management is something almost anyone can benefit from, even if it doesn’t help the breathing.

There are two “laws” of tissue adaptation, one each for hard and soft tissue. Wolff’s law is that bone will change and strengthen in response to loading. This was first noticed by Julius Wolff in the 19th Century, who got the naming rights. It was greatly refined in the mid 20th century by Dr. Harold Frost, an American surgeon who studied bone biology, and published scientific papers more often than I change my socks. The full details of how bone responds to stress are described in his Mechanostat model. The corollary in soft tissue is the obscure and much less developed Davis’ law. (No one even seems to know who Davis was.)

Although there’s no question soft tissue does adapt to stress, the responses of muscles, tendons, and ligaments are much more complex and less well understood. Many treatments are based on the idea of forcing adaptation or “toughening up” tissues by stressing the tissues. It has always been a reasonable idea, but the devil is in the details: what constitutes the “right” amount and kind of stress is difficult to know, and the results of such therapies have generally been highly inconsistent.

ITBS is an infamously stubborn lateral knee pain common in runners. Therapy hasn’t been working? You’re not alone. This exhaustively researched tutorial shows that most medical “facts” about the condition are wrong — supported by 160 footnotes analyzing as much of the science as you can stand. Cures cannot be guaranteed, but this tutorial offers both patients and pros 25 detailed treatment options and more insights than you can find anywhere else, as well as a free bonus: PainScience.com’s valuable trigger point tutorial.

There are two main classifications of pain: the common sensical sort that arises from damaged tissue (nociceptive pain), and the more exotic kind that comes from damage to the system that reports and interprets damage, the nervous system (neuropathic pain). This is the difference between engine trouble and trouble with that light on your dashboard that claims there’s engine trouble. Oddly, there is still no official “other” category for the pain of conditions like fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome, which involve dysfunction of the nervous system, as opposed to damage; names like nocipathic or algopathic are on the table.

The infamous opioids are drugs like codeine (found in small does in Tylenol IIs and IIIs) and the more serious “hillbilly heroin” drugs like Oxycontin, Percocet, and Vicodin. They induce deep relaxation and euphoria and make you not care about the pain. Unfortunately, not caring is not a cure, and their efficacy is surprisingly dubious. And of course they also have grim risks like life-altering addiction and death by overdose, which is shockingly common. The danger can’t be overstated: more ordinary Americans have started to die from opioid overdose than car accidents. The CDC declared in early 2016 that opioids should not be an option for chronic musculoskeletal pain: there’s just too much danger, and too little evidence of benefit.

On the other hand, not everyone gets addicted and some people get real relief, so despite “the opioid crisis” — which is all-too real — there’s plenty of grey area here. If you have a good relationship with a cautious doctor who respects the risks, it’s not unreasonable to consider a short term opioid experiment: it could provide some much needed emotional relief from chronic pain, and maybe even break a vicious cycle. But the need for caution and medical supervision is as high as it gets.

PFPS is a common kneecap pain problem — and yet almost universally misunderstood. Patients are often given exactly the wrong advice. There is no miracle cure for patellar pain, but this tutorial is much more detailed than anything else you can find, weighing in at 40,000 words. Both patients and pros can greatly improve their understanding of the options — and maybe that is a kind of miracle. Inspired by the work of surgeon Scott Dye and firmly grounded in readable analysis of the science.

Alternative medicine practitioners often point accusingly to medical error rates with the implication that their services are much safer. That’s probably true, in the sense that walking is much safer than driving. But if your profession had to treat huge numbers of people with dire injuries and illnesses, it would also have scary error rates.

Bad things do happen in hospitals, and stats about iatrogenic (doctor-generated) medical errors can seem alarming. However, to simply state that medicine kills and hurts people is unethical fear-mongering. Cars kill and hurt people too, and for pretty much the same reason: sure it’s risky, but the benefits are worth the risk, and huge numbers of people are willing to take that chance.

Medical systems deal with vastly greater numbers of much more serious cases than any chiropractor or naturopath, and many of them are no-win, rarely-win, or sometimes-lose situations with the highest stakes, terrible suffering and death. We should be cautious about criticizing that from the outside. Try working in a hospital for a while, try to be perfect, try to never have anything go wrong that matters!

Got a muscle strain? Maybe … and maybe not. Probably 75% of so-called muscle strains are actually something else. Doctors routinely diagnose muscle strain incorrectly. The muscle strain tutorial is guaranteed to sort it out … and it is just about only the source of information that does. For the majority of readers who’ve been misdiagnosed, the muscle strain tutorial ships with a free bonus tutorial about the problem they most likely do have — myofascial trigger points.

There can certainly be something wrong with your spinal joints — there are a few possibilities — but “subluxation” and spinal joints being “out” are not defined clearly enough to be useful, and are probably quite misleading.

“Subluxation” is mainly a chiropractic idea of some kind of spinal joint dysfunction, with many shades of meaning — too many — depending on who is talking about it. However, it is inextricably entangled with the idea of a spinal joint being “out” of place, and it is this sense of the word that needs some debunking. Some chiropractors attribute great importance to subluxation. Most believe that subluxations cause neck and back pain, and — significantly — many also believe that they cause a wide variety of other health problems and so they “use spinal manipulation to treat visceral disease” (Homola). Subluxation theory has been both popular and controversial for many decades now, and it has never achieved medical respectability. Many experts, including quite a few chiropractors, actually deny that spinal subluxations exist in any meaningful sense.

It’s problematic that spinal manipulative therapy — the umbrella term for all kinds of spinal joint “adjustment” — is so often based on such a confusing and controversial concept. Subluxation has too much baggage to be a useful term. Let’s use more modern and specific terminology, and get away from the idea of spinal joints being “out.”

People often experience acutely sensitive, aching spots in their muscle tissue that we call “muscle knots.” They can be surprisingly severe, and massaging them often seems to help quite a bit. What’s going on? The dominant theory is that a trigger point is a patch of tightly contracted muscle, an isolated spasm affecting just a small patch of muscle tissue. Unfortunately, after a few decades it’s still just a theory, and trigger point science is a bit half-baked and somewhat controversial. It’s not even clear that there is really a problem in the meat at all; it could be a sensory “disturbance,” for instance. Meanwhile, people keep hurting, and there is little doubt that there is an important, almost epidemic phenomenon here in need of explaining and treating. Massage — especially self-massage — remains a safe, cheap way of trying to deal with it, and there is some evidence that it can provide some meaningful relief (e.g. Furlan 2008 is probably the best example). That’s why I have a large tutorial devoted to how to self-treat “trigger points” — whatever they really are. But it’s important to keep in mind that they are not well understood.

Many alternative health care practitioners, especially chiropractors, claim that they are as well trained as physicians. This is false. Doctor’s academic training is routinely longer, and — more importantly — most of their serious learning occurs during extensive on-the-job training, where they are thrust into demanding clinical environments and supervised for years as they deal with a great variety of clinical situations and many extremely sick and hurt patients. That hands-on phase of their training is where all doctors will tell you that they became professionals — and there is nothing like it in any non-medical health care training.

Fascia is widely regarded as an exciting scientific frontier, with well-attended fascia conferences featuring “rock star” gurus in the world of massage and manual therapy. The main idea is that fascia — tough connective tissue wrapping around all muscles and organs — can get tight and restrictive, and needs to be “released” by pulling on it artfully. Unfortunately, although fascia science may be inherently interesting as biology, and fascial compartment syndrome is certainly a real and scary medical problem, no subtle property of fascia has yet been shown to be clinically relevant. No fascial pathology seems to be a factor in any common painful problem, and no method of fascial manipulation is known to “fix” fascia or even change it.

I have challenged fascia fans to cite clinically relevant fascia science, with no result years now. This article reviews three key candidates: well-known studies about fascia’s toughness, its contractility, and its fibroblasts. None confirm any clinical relevance of fascia, and one actually undermines it, showing that fascia is too tough to “release.” I also discuss the irrelevance of piezoelectricity, thixotropic effect, and contradict Gil Hedley’s popular fascial “fuzz” theory of stiffness. The article criticizes fascia excitement from a scientific perspective.

Most therapeutic taping is either practical (stabilizing a sprained ankle), or aims to tinker with more subtle biomechanics. Taping has gotten a lot hotter in the last few years with prominent new products and branding, and lots of hype and claims about therapeutic effects, prevention, and performance enhancement. But even Olympic athletes can be fad and fashion victims, and the evidence shows only trivial effects. New materials may achieve different and possibly superior benefits, but probably not much. Taping does not work biomechanically or biologically, as many proponents explain it. It’s more likely that the odd sensations change function and reduce pain, a neurology hack that tends to be upredictable and minor.

The idea of “toxins” is usually used as a tactic to scare people into buying some kind of de-toxifying snake oil. Obviously there are dangerous substances; the problem is with the kind of people who toss the idea around, the reasons they do it (fear, profit, ignorance), and because toxin claims are usually so vague that they are literally meaningless, except as a marketing message. Indeed, “detoxification” may be the single most common marketing buzzword in alternative health care.

The body deals with undesirable molecules in many ways. It eliminates some and recycles others; some are trapped in a safe place; and quite a few can’t be safely handled at all (metals). Most alleged “detox” treatments are focussed on stimulating an excretion pathway, like sweating in a sauna. But it’s not like sweating is broken and the sauna is fixing it! The only truly “detoxifying” treatments help the body eliminate or disarm molecules the body cannot process on its own. A stomach pump for someone with alcohol poisoning is literally “detoxifying.” So are chelation for heavy metals, and antivenoms.

I cover the specific idea of “flushing” toxins in Should You Drink Water After Massage? (Massage is wonderful for all kinds of reasons — it doesn’t need the support of the idea that it detoxifies.) For more general consumer advocacy and education about toxins, see “Detoxification” Schemes and Scams (from QuackWatch.org).

Therapeutic touch (TT) is hands-off aura massage, actual touch not included, and it is the most common form of energy or vitalistic medicine in North America. Most practitioners are massage therapists and, oddly, nurses. Many years ago I believed in it, but eventually I decided it was based only on wishful thinking, laughably naive references to quantum physics, and wide-eyed exaggeration of ordinary social interaction effects. Auras do not exist and cannot be felt, let alone manipulated therapeutically. Just as dousers and psychics have never passed a controlled test, TT practitioners cannot not detect a person by feeling their aura, which makes them look ridiculous.

It is peculiar and pleasant to have someone wave their hands all around you with friendly intentions, but those effects are minor and fleeting and it doesn’t matter what specifically the therapist does, because it’s the interaction that is the active ingredient — a placebo, in short. And placebo is nowhere near as “powerful” as people believe, and there are all kinds of ethical and practical problems with cluttering up the interaction with magical interpretations of what’s going on.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections bathe troubled cells in a concentrated mixture of platelets from your own blood. Platelets are involved in clotting and wound healing, and so the more-is-better hope is that they’ll stimulate healing “naturally” — regenerative medicine, supposedly. Unfortunately, the hype and costs are high, there could be risks above and beyond the basic risks of any injection, and the science so far is completely discouraging — three major evidence reviews have ruled it “ineffective.” Although it’s plausible and interesting in theory, this stuff just can’t beat placebos in fair tests.

Applied kinesiology (AK) muscle testing is a pseudoscientific method of diagnosis used by many chiropractors and naturopaths, and denounced as an absurd parlour trick by everyone else. (AK has no relationship to kinesiology, the legitimate study of human movement.) Practitioners believe that changes in muscle strength, reacting to substances placed in the aura and probing questions, reveal the sensitivities and needs of the patient. This is about as scientific as a ouija board. There is almost no real AK research, of course: no real scientist would bother.

Patients are often impressed by AK, because it exploits potent illusions based on the ideomotor and observer-expectancy or subject-expectancy (power of suggestion) effects. It fools practitioners just as readily as it fools patients: most are deluded true believers, not scam artists.

Doctors lack the skills and knowledge to treat most common aches, pains and injury problem, especially stubborn cases, and even the best are poor substitutes for physical therapists. Many doctors are well aware of this, but some are alarmingly oblivious. Dr. Jonathon Tomlinson, an instructor at St. Leonards Hospital in Hoxton, explains that “undergraduate training is focused on hospital orthopedics (broken bones and anything else that’s amenable to surgery) or rheumatology (nasty inflammatory diseases) which comprise a minority of the aches/pains/strains and injuries that people actually suffer from.”

Medical researchers have done many studies showing that most doctors do not understand aches and pains or heed expert recommendations. A good example is a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine showing that family doctors frequently ignore guidelines for the care of low back pain — see Williams et al. In 2002, Freedman et al wrote: “It is ... reasonable to conclude that medical school preparation in musculoskeletal medicine is inadequate.” In 2005 in Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Matzkin et al concluded that “training in musculoskeletal medicine is inadequate in both medical school and non-orthopaedic residency training programs.” In 2006, Stockard et al found that 82% of medical graduates “failed to demonstrate basic competency in musculoskeletal medicine.”

Healing speed is of great interest, and people often believe that treatment X helped them to heal faster. It’s also a common marketing claim. Unfortunately, most patients aren’t the least bit knowledgeable about what constitutes a normal healing time, and should probably defer to clinicians who have seen hundreds or even thousands of examples — except that they don’t really know either, because they do know that healing time varies wildly depending on countless variables. People often recover faster or slower than expected for reasons no one can ever know. We also seem to recover faster or slower depending on which psychological “goggles” we have on (optimistic, pessimistic, etc).

The bottom line is that the natural variation in healing times tends to obscure the effects of treatments, and simply isn’t actually possible to know if any treatment helped us heal “faster,” because we can never know how long it would have taken without it. You also don’t know what will happen the next time. The only possible way to settle such questions and confirm a faster average recovery time — especially if it’s only a little bit faster — is with carefully designed scientific testing, and quite a bit of it.

Muscle fibres do not normally contract all at once, as most people imagine. Instead they are organized into groups called “motor units,” one per motor nerve. Rather than firing all at once, the groups alternate their contractions, like pistons. At any given time, countless motor units are in different phases of contraction and relaxation. The units are so small and the switching system is so fast that their coordinated action seems to be completely smooth to us. However, if you get tired enough that a lot of motor units start failing to contract, the switching system fails because there aren’t enough motor units available for smooth contraction. This is why muscles start to ripple and quiver with very intense exertions. The obscure term “myokymia” is the closest thing to the right word for this.

A claim is any unverified assertion. But not all claims are created equal. In health care and health science, “claim” implies a more self-serving assertion. If a claim could be used as a bullet-point in a sales pitch, it’s more claim-y. If it makes you (or your profession) look better, it’s more claim-y. And the more claim-y it is, the more it needs to be backed up.

This special case of the word claim comes from the thorny ethical challenges with selling care to sick, hurt people. All claims need critical appraisal and verification, but it’s just not as ethically critical if it has no claim-stink. Sagan’s idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is not just about alien abductions and lake monsters. It’s also, in spirit, about more mundane but self-serving and profitable claims — a more common ethical hazard than truly extraordinary claims.

One of the most common and serious basic problems with alternative medicine is that ominous signs and symptoms of serious disease are often overlooked, misinterpreted, and minimized by many overconfident and under-trained “professionals.” Naturopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists often have a haughty disdain for “mainstream” medicine.

Of course doctors often also overlook problems — nobody’s perfect (see Medical Errors in Perspective). However, the chances of a doctor missing a scary diagnosis are generally much lower, because they have vastly more experience with much sicker people (see Chiropractor, Naturopath Training Way Less Than Doctors).

“Masking symptoms,” especially with medications, is often maligned because it doesn’t “aid healing” or “treat the root cause.” But masking symptoms can be a perfectly good idea, and it should not be eschewed just because it doesn’t have a real healing effect … because there are very few real healing effects! Maybe none. There are few or no known ways to actually improve on the biological process of healing. We can’t tell the body, “Hey, heal better, will ya?”

“Healing” is mainly about removing impediments to natural recovery, such as continued overuse and excessive stress. It’s not dictated by some mythical power to speed healing, but by a strong understanding of the nature of the problem and what pisses it off and slows recovery. The most idiotically simple example is that bad sprains need to be immobilized for a while, just like a fracture — and maybe that seems “obvious,” but it was actually common practice for decades to recommend excessive early mobilization.

Here’s a classic, trickier example: patellofemoral pain is often misdiagnosed and “treated” with strength training that tends to stress the knee even more, and yet it often works to simply avoid sitting with bent knees, because that position is more biomechanically “intense” than most patients realize. Removing that sneaky knee stress isn’t “healing,” per se, but it’s sure important!

Focus on facilitating natural recovery, and don’t knock a little “symptom relief” along the way.

Simon Lehna Singh’s story is now the most famous example of legal bullying of a science writer for commenting on controversial health care, with important consequences for free speech, and great personal significance (I was being legally bullied for similar reasons at the same time).

Singh criticized the British Chiropractic Association for endorsing spinal adjustment for children, famously calling it “bogus.” The BCA sued, exploiting Britain’s nasty libel laws, and the case got off to a rough start for free speech. Singh persisted until the case became a public relations disaster for the BCA, and they withdrew.

A science writer should be able to comment on genuine concerns on an important public health issue (such as correct treatment for children) without the threat and expense of British High Court libel claims. The cost of an opinion about a controversial health care issue should not be ruinous. In the words of Frank Frizelle: “Let’s hear your evidence, not your legal muscle.”

Alternative medicine practitioners often derisively accuse their critics of being “reductionist.” This is intended to sound wise and knowing, but sneering at reductionism is a transparently convenient way to dismiss rational objections to crank theories and flaky bullshit. It insultingly insinuates a lack of vision and savvy about complex systems (like the body). It’s just an ideological gripe, not a meaningful thought, about people who allegedly can’t see the forest for the trees. (This is quite ironic, coming as it usually does from barely-trained dabblers and dilettantes, people who clearly have not exactly mastered either forest or trees.)

Certainly reductionism can go wrong, like nearly any mental mode, but it’s not an intellectual failing. It’s just one of many thinking and reasoning tools … not an all-consuming obliviousness to “the whole.”

Confirmation bias explains a lot about human nature. Most people know it best as “selective hearing” or “selective memory” — hearing and remembering only what you want to hear (see also “pareidolia”). Confirmation bias is a whole lot more: a dazzling array of devious and largely unconscious mental tactics and thinking glitches that lead people to confirm their beliefs and pet theories. We not only tend to ignore, deny and overlook anything that contradicts our point of view, but we also invariably notice, inflate and or even fabricate anything that supports it.

Confirmation bias is one of the main reasons that The Truth is so slippery, and both amateurs and experts alike are prone to significant thinking errors. There are people who consider it part of their job description to eliminate confirmation bias from their thinking — the best scientists and journalists, for instance — but it’s really difficult. Everyone has confirmation bias: it’s just how minds (don’t) work!

Massage is not a detoxification treatment in any sense, contrary to a popular belief. Ironically, it’s the opposite: post-massage soreness and malaise (PMSM) is probably caused by mild rhabdomyolysis (“rhabdo”). True rhabdo is a medical emergency in which the kidneys are poisoned by myoglobin from muscle crush injuries. But many physical and metabolic stresses cause milder rhabdo-like states — even just intense exercise can do it, and probably massage as well. This is substantiated by a case study of acute rhabdomyolsis caused by intense massage (see Lai), by many well-documented cases of exertional or “white collar” rhabdo, and by the strong similarity between PMSM and ordinary exercise soreness. A rhabdo cocktail of waste metabolites and by-products of tissue damage is probably why we feel a bit cruddy after biological stresses and traumas — even massage, sometimes. And you can’t “flush” the rhabdo away with massage or by drinking a little extra water. PMSM is just an unavoidable mild side effect of strong massage.

Digital motion X-ray (DMX) is an X-ray video: many X-ray images strung together to make a movie. The output is impressive. In theory, it can reveal serious problems that somehow eluded diagnosis otherwise. In practice, this unregulated and banned-in-Canada technology is primarily sold to neck pain patients by chiropractors, often for evidence in personal injury lawsuits, and is eschewed in medicine because of concern about radiation exposure. DMX undoubtedly has some potential to show important things, but is it worth an increased risk of cancer to diagnose conditions that, mostly, can and should be diagnosed any other way? It’s not completely out of the question, but you should get multiple medical opinions and think hard before resorting to this exotic diagnostic method.

The colorful history of medicine and quackery is overflowing with people who “swore by” treatments that were bizarre and dangerous. Bloodletting was popular almost until the 20th century, despite being relentlessly harmful. Some of the most lethal “cures” in history were inspired by the discovery of radiation. People happily drank metals like mercury and silver. Even drinking urine had near fad status for a while! They tried to purge disease with sulfuric acid, and stimulate their vitality (and virility) with powerful electric shocks. Women were sold Lysol as a douche … and women actually went along with it for a while. Voluntary lobotomy may be the craziest of them all: it was a popular treatment for all kinds of psychiatric disorders, and at least fifty thousand people volunteered to have their brains lanced.

All of these terrible treatments, and many more obscure examples, had many fans and enthusiastic testimonials. People paid for them, believed in them, loved them, swore by them — that is how misleading testimonials can be. People believe what they want to believe.

Electrosensitivity is an alleged allergy to electromagnetic fields and radiation. It is the basis for paranoia particularly about the health effects of Wi-Fi networks, power lines, and cell phones — fears that top the charts of human irrationality. There’s little doubt that the afflicted are suffering from something, but it is either an unrelated medical condition or psychosomatic. Electrosensitivity, like (non-celiac) gluten sensitivity, has been thoroughly debunked.

Unsurprisingly, many people who believe they can heal with life energy — reiki, acupuncture, and so on — are also active spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about artificial energy.

No one with an actual energy allergy would last a day anywhere in the modern world. It would be an electrosensitive holocaust. They’d vanish in a poof of oversensitive smoke, moths flying into a bonfire.

Whenever I make criticasms of sloppy writing, I do open myself up to a charge of hypocrazy, because there are certainly scattered errrs on my website , probbly even on this veru page. But it’s a matter of dagree. I only critisize someone’s communiation skills when their writeing problem are signicifant and revelant: when the errors are thick and nasty and thick and nasty, when they arre combimed with style problems like SHOUTING IN CAPS!!!, or abusing “quotion marks”; or just horrible spellung and grammer and sentense structure, and and whn they betray ignoranse of the subjet matter,, like a chiropracor who writes the “veterbra” three times in the same short email and declares “I’m a proffesional”.

(I’m not making that last bit up. I actually got that message.)

Not everyone’s a writer, but writing with many glaring errors is much worse than just lacking a knack — and it exposes a lack of mental rigour and maturity. There is such a thing as a minimum literacy required for one’s ideas to be taken srsly.