What if everything they told us about running and knees was wrong? That’s what New York Times fitness writer Gretchen Reynolds suggests, based on research at Brigham Young University, where scientists drew blood and synovial fluid (the stuff the lubricates joints) from 30 healthy volunteers before and after they either […]
Pain
Daily Aspirin Benefits Outweigh Risks
For decades, health experts have advised us that a daily aspirin can reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke, but they also warned that too much aspirin can increase the risk of stomach bleeds. What to do? That question has now been answered, although not for the final time, by […]
Testosterone And ACL Tears
Why is it that women are up to 10 times more likely than men to  tear an ACL? Researchers at Johns Hopkins think it may have something to do with testosterone. A Johns Hopkins news release reports that researchers at the school found that normal male rats with natural supplies […]
For Torn Meniscus, Try Exercise Before Surgery
Many doctors, mainly orthopedic surgeons, would like us to think that surgical repair is the best fix for a torn meniscus, and for some particularly large tears, that may be true. But now comes a study from orthopedic surgeons at Martina Hansens Hospital in Sandvika, Norway, which tracked outcomes for […]
Ibuprofen And Healing, Probably Not
Does ibuprofen, the choice of pain relievers for most athletes, promote healing, or does it just reduce pain? That’s the question that New York Times fitness columnist Gretchen Reynolds tackles, with help from  Stuart Warden, a professor of health science at Indiana University who has studied ibuprofen and tendinopathy, as […]
Pot, Not Opioids, For Pain Reduction
Smoking pot could be one answer to the country’s growing opioid abuse problem. Why do we say that? Because researchers at the University of Michigan have found that patients using medical marijuana to control chronic pain reported a 64 percent reduction in their use of more traditional prescription pain medications […]
Ultramarathon Pain: Older Runners Feel Better Faster
How long does it take to recover from an ultramarathon? Researchers who studied 72 people who ran the 2015 Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile race through the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California that requires runners to climb about 18,000 feet, can tell you. Five days on average. HealthDay reports […]
For Lower Back Pain, Exercise
First, the bad news. An academic review of 23 seemingly authoritative studies of back pain relief found that most of them, which involved education or orthotics, did almost nothing to reduce the likelihood of another bout of pain. But as Gretchen Reynolds reports in the New York Times, exercise did […]
Men and Women Feel Pain Differently
He hurts; she hurts, but she hurts differently–and probably more often. That’s the opinion of researchers at McGill University, who took a close look at the longstanding theory that pain is transmitted from the site of injury or inflammation through the nervous system using an immune system cell called microglia. […]
Study: Marijuana Effective Treatment for Chronic Pain
Don’t bogart that joint. Pass it over to someone who lives with chronic neuropathic pain. That’s the advice from researchers at McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and McGill University, who conducted a randomized controlled trial to investigate the analgesic effect of inhaled cannabis in 21 people with chronic neuropathic pain. […]