Index of Oddball Articles

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I have been doing this job for two entire decades, I am fast typist, and I have been through many phases of inspiration about what kinds of things I should write about. It’s also more or less impossible to predict what content will actually be found by Internet searchers.

The result is that I have quite a few articles that have just one thing in common: not many readers. Other than that, they are all over the map. There’s little reason for many of these to be linked from anywhere but here, which is why I’ve created this page: so that someone, occasionally, will actually find them.

• Pain & Injury Survival Tips — Dozens of ideas (and links) for evidence-based rehabilitation and self-treatment for common pain problems and injuries
• Pain Relief from Personal Growth — Treating tough pain problems with the pursuit of emotional intelligence, life balance, and peacefulness
• Placebo Power Hype — The placebo effect is fascinating, but its “power” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
• The Power of Barking: Correlation, causation, and how we decide what treatments work — A silly metaphor for a serious point about the confounding power of coincidental and inevitable healing, and why we struggle to interpret our own recovery experiences
• A Stretching Experiment — What happens when you stretch your hamstrings intensely for several minutes a day in a steam room?
• Homeopathy Schmomeopathy — Homeopathy is not a natural or herbal remedy: it’s a magical idea with no possible basis in reality
• Hydrotherapy, Water-Powered Rehab — A guide to using warm and cold water as a treatment for pain and injury
• Healer Syndrome — The problem with health care professionals, especially in alternative medicine, who want to be known as “healers”
• Healing Usually Accelerates — The better you get, the faster you get better, a “delicious cycle” — but what if it doesn’t?
• The Not-So-Humble Healer — Cocky theories about the cause of pain are waaaay too common in massage, chiropractic, and physical therapy
• Most Pain Treatments Damned With Faint Praise — Most controversial and alternative therapies are fighting over scraps of “positive” scientific evidence that damn them with the faint praise of small effect sizes that cannot impress
• Is Diagnosis for Pain Problems Reliable? — Reliability science shows that health professionals can’t agree on many popular theories about why you’re in pain
• Science versus Experience in Physical Medicine — The conflict between science and clinical experience and pragmatism in the management of aches, pains, and injuries
• Smoking and Chronic Pain — We often underestimate the power of (tobacco) smoking to make things hurt more and longer
• T’ai Chi Helps Fibromyalgia, but It’s Not “Alternative” Medicine — Despite a high profile boost from the New England Journal of Medicine, it’s still just gentle, elegant, and pleasant exercise
• The False Humility of “Facilitating” Healing — Facilitating self-healing is either real but trivial, or interesting but wrong.
• The Causes of Runner's Knee Are Rarely Obvious — The science shows that you usually can’t blame IT band pain or patellofemoral pain on the structural quirks that seem like “obvious” problems
• Insurance Is Not Evidence — Debunking the idea that “it must be good if insurance companies pay for it”
• Is Knee Pain More Common in Women? — The relationship between sex and knee pain, especially runner’s knee (IT band syndrome, patellofemoral pain)
• Masking Pain is Under-Rated — “Masking” symptoms is often scorned, but sometimes symptoms need masking — especially pain!
• The Medical Blind Spot for Aches, Pains & Injuries — Most physicians are unqualified to care for many common pain and injury problems, especially the more stubborn and tricky ones
• How to Simplify Chronic Pain Puzzles — Use Occam’s razor to clean up a mess of theories about your stubborn injury or pain problem
• Toxins, Schmoxins! — The idea of “toxins” is used to scare people into buying snake oil
• What if You Could Wipe the Chronic Pain Slate Clean? — A short, poignant thought experiment for chronic pain sufferers