What is this blog about?

I have chronic pain. I've been to lots of doctors, I'm on a lot of meds, I've attended a centre of pain education ("COPE") and I've tried a lot of things, but my pain is still very bad (although it would be a lot worse if left completely untreated, as I've discovered from trying to drop some of the things I've tried). I've started this blog as a place to record what works for me and what doesn't. My hope for this blog is that other people will also contribute their experiences and the blog will become a resource for people everywhere with chronic pain.

Declaration of interests: as at the time of writing no one is paying me any money at all to write about or promote anything or giving me free trials of any kind of treatment method. If that changes, I'll let you know in the blog post about the treatment in question.

Two things I learnt about chronic pain from the centre of pain education are that:

• chronic pain is still very badly understood,
• scientists have not gathered very much in the way of evidence for what works (other than for meds).

This annoys me no end, as I'm a great believer in evidence-based medicine (I like things to be tested to see how well they work rather than just relying on theories and not bothering to test them. The history of medicine is littered with theories that were later proved completely incorrect and sometimes even harmful). Unfortunately I'm in no position to gather good scientific evidence about what works and what doesn't, as that would involve doctors, researchers, double blind trials and millions of pounds, and I don't have any of those. The best I can do is try things out and see what works for me and what doesn't and put them in this blog and hope that other people will contribute their own experiences. Technically this is only anecdotal evidence, and even if I gather lots of anecdotal evidence from lots of different people, it's still not as good as proper scientific evidence. As the saying goes: the plural of anecdote is not data. What it is though, is a start. A start that people can use to inform their decisions about what to try next and a start that might help scientists work out what they should be researching next to see if it really does work. My biggest hope for this blog is that it will prove useful: to me, to the pursuit of knowledge and to other sufferers of chronic pain.