Resources
What we recommend, and why
Nothing on this page is paid placement. Where we have a financial interest, we say so — and none of the items below are ours.
Organisations
- International Association for the Study of Pain
- The field's professional body. Its terminology page is the reference we use for definitions such as nociplastic pain.
- Cochrane Library
- Systematic reviews with plain-language summaries. The first place to check when a single study is making headlines.
- Pain Concern
- Patient-facing charity with a long-running interview series. Useful when you want the lived-experience side without the sales pitch.
- National pain patient charities
- Most countries have one. They are usually the fastest route to local peer support and to clinician directories that have been vetted.
Books
- Explain Pain — Butler & Moseley
- The book that made pain neuroscience education mainstream. Still the clearest starting point on mechanism.
- The Way Out — Alan Gordon
- A mind-body approach with a randomised trial behind it. We recommend it alongside our Debated Perspective article on trauma.
- Why We Sleep — Matthew Walker
- Popular and occasionally overstated. Read it for motivation, and check specific claims against the primary literature.
Tools that earn their place
- A sleep diary, on paper
- Two weeks of honest data changes more clinical conversations than any wearable we have seen.
- A flare-up plan written when calm
- Decide in advance what you will do during a bad week. Decisions made mid-flare are rarely your best ones.
- Activity tracking by tolerance, not pain score
- Record what you managed, not how much it hurt. The first number moves in the direction you want.
Five questions to bring to your appointment
- 1What is the evidence that this treatment helps my specific condition?
- 2What happens if I do nothing for six weeks?
- 3Is this finding on my scan common in people my age without pain?
- 4What would make you change this diagnosis?
- 5What should improve, and by when, for us to say this is working?
Browse the library by topic
Back Pain
Why imaging findings and pain so often disagree.
Neck Pain
Posture, load tolerance, and the myth of the perfect spine.
Pelvic Pain
A region where protective muscle guarding is routinely missed.
Sciatica
Nerve irritation, recovery timelines, and what actually helps.
Fibromyalgia
Widespread pain as a problem of signal processing.
Central Sensitization
When the alarm system becomes more sensitive than the threat.
Stress
How sustained threat states change pain thresholds.
Trauma
Adversity, safety, and the biology of persistent pain.
Sleep
The most underrated variable in chronic pain recovery.
Nervous System
Predictive processing, threat appraisal, and pain output.
Recovery Stories
Honest accounts of non-linear recovery.
Research Explained
Plain-language readings of important papers.
The Weekly Reading
One careful email each Sunday
A short reading on pain science, what changed in the research this week, and what remains uncertain. Subscribe and we will send you Ten Things Pain Science Changed Its Mind About — a free 18-page guide.
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