Understanding Pain - Link Dump

[Gypsy Jazz]

If the world made perfect sense then pain and injury would be the same thing. As it turns out, tissue damage and pain are incredibly poorly correlated despite common sense telling us otherwise. Over a good while I've been doing my very best to understand pain and how it works and I've decided to dump some links that I've found particularly helpful in my learning process.

This is a really important issue to me because I have been a chronic pain sufferer in the past and my treatment was very poorly done on the whole. The bad news is that even most people in medicine and rehab roles have no clue about modern pain science despite a large amount of high quality research. The good news is that for those who suffer from pain, education alone can dramatically reduce that pain. The great news is that if this information is spread to both ends of the spectrum that the way pain is dealt with will improve by gigantic amounts very quickly.

This is not an easy subject and there are a lot of things to unlearn in understanding pain. Links are posted in order that I think they should be read/watched:



http://www.bboyscience.com/damage-does-not-cause-pain/

http://www.bettermovement.org/2012/t...nd-my-brother/

http://bretcontreras.com/2011/03/a-r...-chronic-pain/ - the "Recommended Reading" link at the end contains books and videos that are all worth exploring if the subject interests you

http://www.themanualtherapist.com/20...by-dr-joe.html

Bonus articles on how posture and pain have almost no relationship to one another:

http://www.mindandmuscle.net/article...th-or-reality/

http://saveyourself.ca/articles/posture-exercise.php

[Gypsy Jazz]

I don't love replying to my own posts, but I absolutely loved this study: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/9/128

Pain education when combined with exercise (of any kind) is superior for the prevention of low back pain.

A few months ago I would have been staggered with the fact that "traditional" low back exercises outperformed "stability" exercise as the leaders in biomechanics seem to indicate the lumbar area's primary need for injury prevention is endurance stability. My new(ish) and improved understanding of pain allows everything here to make sense.