PainScience.com (Paul Ingraham)

We can try to be friends despite the dunking thing. 😜

Not that there's anything even remotely funny about the CONSEQUENCES of pseudoscience and quackery!

But I really like satire as a rhetorical tool.

Also dad jokes and cat memes.

Wait, wut? 🤯 Really? Other platforms have trained me so well to avoid links that I’m struggling to wrap my head around this radical idea!

If Bluesky actually doesn't penalize posts with links, it’s one of the single best reasons to be here.

Amen to everything there … except the "humourless" part. 🙂 I’m definitely going to try be a FUNNY asshole about it.

Someday. But we might need to call ourselves some other name to avoid getting purged before that day.

Interesting. I suppose I might learn about some situations where I’m more (or less) stressed than expected. But I suspect I’d mostly just get confirmation that watching the news is ROUGH…

And making content like this is just impossible without ordinary people who choose to be small-scale patrons of the arts. I hope PainSci members think they are getting their money’s worth…but I mainly hope they just think the project is worth supporting.

www.painscience.com/membership

No matter how much AI improves, it’s not going to learn to tell stories about my old friend who just had a surgery for the kind of back problem I’m writing about.

And that’s why some of you pay me the big bucks!

Because good writing has always been hard, personal work …

For instance, embellishments based on relevant personal experience are vital for making content readable and relatable. I can’t see these limitations changing significantly any time soon — just like with “full” self-driving, that last step is a doozy.

That takes care of some busy work for me, no doubt. But THEN I put in hours of work to produce something FAR BETTER, with many features no AI can hope to match, a LIST of things in the final post that is beyond the reach of this tech… because it cannot read my damn mind!

It’s a novelty, not a truly high quality simulation of my style. The draft it coughed up wasn’t within a mile of the final product. What I did get was a rough structure, a few useful phrases, and a couple ideas about what to focus on — and that has value. It’s helpful, for sure.

PainSci and AI

I generated a draft of yesterday's blog post about using one of the best current AI tools.

Spoiler alert: it sucked. 👎🏻 Boooo.

I’ve worked with these large language models a fair bit now, and I’ve even trained one to write a bit like me — a neat trick, but …

Poop of pain Fibromyalgia is the unexplained disease of widespread pain and fatigue — with symptoms that have now been…

A new study shows that fibromyalgia can follow fecal matter from humans into mice. 💩 Gross? Yes. Fascinating? Also yes.

PainScience.com/blog/poop-of-pain.html

Just sent out a newsletter post with 3 bite-sized pain science updates:

1—feminine fibromyalgia
2—nervy inflammation
3—analgesic empathy

All shared previously on social media…but they are easy to miss here! So I send 'em out by email in small batches for my subscribers:

painscience.com/subscribe

"Be careful what you wish for"! But I’m very happy to take requests … and triage them as needed. 🙂 My job is to make my content as useful as possible for any/all readers, but teachers are in a special category.

I di flirt with that idea…10 years ago. 🙂 But around 2015 I started shifting away from massage and manual therapy and writing more broadly about the science of pain and rehab medicine, and I’ve been spread too thin ever since to seriously consider designing a massage curriculum!

Injection infection? Another surprising way to freeze a shoulder Some frozen shoulders could be caused by P. acnes hitching a ride into shoulder joints on needles.

And a LOT of shoulders got needled during the pandemic…many more case reports to work with than ever before, formal “anecdata.”

NEW POST, excerpt from my frozen shoulder book, updated science and new audio for members. ~1000 words of detail/citations:

www.painscience.com/blog/injecti...

P. acnes is endemic on our skin, harder to wipe out than bed bugs. So it can get dragged into the joint by surgical tools.

And IF surgery can do it, then there’s probably a much more common way for P. ACNES to catch a ride into the joint capsule… injection.

Needles. 💉

Microscopic view of P. acnes bacterium.

One likely cause of frozen shoulder is…infection. 🦠

It’s a good example of an unexpected—and maybe underestimated—pathological mechanism for a common painful problem: a slow-burn infection of a joint with Propionibacterium acnes.

How does it get in there?

Aw, thanks Bodhi!

Not that it would be a BAD thing … 😜

If there's anything I can ever do to make my articles more useful for you to cite/share, please do not hesitate to let me know.

The main problem is that pain is rarely as “simple” as it seems. It’s not rocket science…it’s HARDER than that.

But there’s much more to be said about it. 🙂 NEW POST! Part 1 of 3, free 300-word summary, 3000 words of nerdy details (and audio) for members.

www.painscience.com/blog/why-is-...

Image from Shutterstock. It’s not a classical statue of a “facepalm,” but it certainly looks that way. It’s actually a depiction of “Cain After Killing His Brother Abel,” by Henri Vidal, found in the Tuileries Garden in Paris.

HOW can medical help for such a SIMPLE problem be SO amateurish? WHAT IS WRONG?! 😱

A reader was outraged by a string of examples of egregiously incompetent care she’d gotten for a stubborn injury. All routine nonsense from my perspective—I hear daily stories like this—but she was stunned.

Yep, I already know about you, for ages now actually. 🙂 Thank you for following, welcome. I have been doing science journalism about pain and physical medicine since mid-2000s … but I’ve also been fighting ME-ish chronic pain/illness myself since 2015, which is of course why I found your work.

Very likely. There are actually many hard-to-diagnose conditions that get sloppily called "fibromyalgia," often for years before they are finally correctly diagnosed.

Perceived pill importance probably powerless to amplify placebo The evidence behind this old idea is surprisingly flimsy.

Big red pills don’t boost placebo: that’s just ✨vibes📷 from flimsy 90s science no one ever bothered to replicate.

Placebo power? More like placebo PR! And yet another placebo myth.

www.painscience.com/blog/placebo...

Wondered when someone was going to say it! 🌅🐺

Con Artists or True Believers? You may be the victim of a grift. We apparently live in the era of the con, the scam, the grift. Podcasters, YouTubers, and social media influencers have no qualms in referring to anyone that is selli...

Are we too quick to refer to alt health influencers as “grifters?” Are they choosing to deceive you… or do they really believe what they’re saying?

My reflection on the topic for @mcgilloss.bsky.social

www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

I’ve never seen this before, despite the fact that I’m always looking up. I guess it’s quite rare to have a puffier, taller cloud under a nice flat cloud layer … yet still fully exposed to the light at the right angle.

Caught this neat cloud shadow near sunset yesterday, and just barely: although the shadow lasted for a few minutes, it was only highly distinct and photogenic for about a minute.