For how we live.
For acute ankle sprains, a review found only two poor trials and no clear benefit from ice. For sore muscles, cold-water immersion helps modestly. For low-back pain, a heat wrap has the best support.
A Cochrane review found lumbar supports do not prevent back pain and their treatment value was unclear. A new French randomised trial found a soft belt added to usual care modestly improved pain and disability.
Two Cochrane reviews found that for ordinary acute low back pain, advice to rest in bed is slightly worse than advice to stay active. For sciatica, it makes little difference either way.
An umbrella review of 41 systematic reviews found sitting, standing and 'bad' posture are at most weakly and inconsistently linked to low back pain — and none of it establishes that posture is the cause.
The old advice to buy the hardest mattress you can find is not what the trials show. A double-blind randomised trial and a systematic review both favour medium firmness.
The same sport that a 300,000-person Swedish cohort associated with a 40% lower death rate carries an injury incidence in professionals roughly six times that of amateurs. The difference is dose.
OPAL randomised 347 people in Australian primary care and emergency departments. At six weeks the opioid group's mean pain score was slightly worse than the placebo group's.
PACE randomised patients across 235 primary care centres and found recovery took 17 days on the drug and 16 days on placebo. For osteoarthritis the picture differs, but not flatteringly.
An umbrella review of 41 systematic reviews found no consensus that posture causes back pain. And correcting posture reliably changes alignment — but not, consistently, pain.
Six randomised trials found no benefit from immediate imaging over usual care. A separate review explains the reason: most of what a scan finds is present in people with no pain at all.