People with a lower socioeconomic background were twice as likely to develop chronic pain following injury, a new study has found. #backpain #chronicpain #painscience #painresearch tinyurl.com/2sp5aff3

A review of 7 factors that can make people experience pain differently than others. #painexperience #painscience tinyurl.com/46w8cf8n

Much more about The Cholesterol Controversy from a trusted website (ScienceBasedMed), and a particularly good expert, Dr. Christopher Labos (@drlabos):

sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-cholestero…

No no no, exercise is a celebration of what I will GET to eat AFTER! 😜

Perhaps our 'blind eye' to learning sci comes from our laconic historic model 'do this exercise Xtimes Xtimes per week'- we remould muscles but remoulding the biopsychosocial is a whole other bunch of emergent phenomena requiring an overlapping engagement #painscience #PNE

Back pain 'trajectories': how well, or badly, do things tend to go with chronic #backpain ?

Spoiler alert: Pain has a nasty habit of continuing in the same general direction. 😕

NEW POST, small, 2-min read:

painscience.com/blog/back-pain…

Experiences of racial discrimination activate many of the same brain regions that are implicated in the affective-motivational processing (i.e., unpleasantness) of physical pain. #painscience tinyurl.com/3483tjyf

This gets my vote for Tweet of the Week: a case that looked like 'typica' musculoskeletal symptoms … but was actually early onset Parkinson’s.

Aches and pains can be the tip of pathological icebergs.

What’s “cholesterol denialism”? To find out in one easy step, just say anything at all about cholesterol or statins on social media. Or probably anywhere at all!

How heavy is a disc herniation?

A study of intervertebral disc herniations by Mariajoseph et al. in 122 middle-aged patients with sciatica took an unusual approach to measuring the size of the bulge: they WEIGHED whatever they cut off!

Average weight? Half a gram.

There’s not much of “the good” to report about patellofemoral joint replacement; it’s mostly just the bad and the ugly.

But, as usual, it’s helpful to think about WHY.

PainScience.com/blog/kneecap-r…

Kneecap replacement: bad idea? 🤔

NEW POST today, a TEMPORARILY FREE excerpt from my book about patellofemoral joint pain.

PainScience.com/blog/kneecap-r…

But this is not just for the knee pain folks! I hope it’s a good example of how to think about the pros & cons of ANY surgery.

Oooh, fun: I zoomed in until the illusion broke … and then when I zoomed back out, NO MORE RED. Fascinating! Didn't think that would happen.

Temporary, though. The redness came back after a short break.

Interesting. But, for perspective, the size of a splinter doesn't seem to have much to do with how much it hurts either. Just because it’s small doesn't mean it’s not a problem! But interesting.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35738184/

Anatomy is tightly packed! Most things are smaller than you think.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35738184/

Hard to believe such a teensy amount of material could be the cause of so much discomfort? This study backs you up. A few more details…

My books (there are 10):

painscience.com/ebookstore

Interesting: the illusion appears NOT to be explained by expecting a Coke can to be red. Illusions not always what they seem to seem to be. 😏

Un-fun fact: This is part of a project I started almost a year ago, upgrading all my content on intervertebral discs. This study was 1y old then… now 2! Yikes! It’s not unusual for me to chip away at many big projects for ages, but that's a bit ridiculous even by my standards.

“Disc fragment weight no effect on the severity of pain at presentation or after microdiscectomy.” They looked at other factors as well — spinal canal compromise, herniation classification, and vertebral level — and none of those were clearly linked to symptom severity either.

📘 Tom Jesson 🧠Michael W. Robert🧬 YouTube Probably time to revise what we think 'his thing' is.