I phrased that poorly. What I meant was not that the moon is continuously very close throughout the entire month, but rather that it remains relatively close for several days before and after being full at perigee ("supermoon")…and it will do that yet again next month, for the third month in a row.

Moon comparison image by Şenol Şanlı: www.instagram.com/snlsanli/

As showcased recently by APOD:

www.star.ucl.ac.uk/~apod/apod/a...

APOD unavailable at its NASA.gov since the shutdown…but you can still get it from mirror sites, still posting. All the mirror URLs:

apod.nasa.gov/apod/lib/abo...

I’ve been intending to write about this topic for about 20 years now. I think I’ve been procrastinating as I tried to figure out what how to say what I wanted to say! 😜

The post is a 4-minute read. TL;DR:

Isn't it good to relieve suffering? Yes! Are they really different? They are, but they have a very close working relationship. Why does this matter? Conflating them is bad for care!

… after injuring their sciatic nerves, far away in the hip! …

And the mapping showed a shift in activity over a month from the motor cortex to the hypothalamus, which sheds some light on how pain becomes chronic.

This is my 1st take, with no commentary on cromulence.

So microglia are the immune cells of the central nervous system, and they shape-change depending on their activity.

When provoked by injury, infection, or stress, they get amoeboid, thickened, and mobile.

This study mapped where these changes happened in the BRAINS of rats …

I also used a 10 sec shutter delay to give it plenty of time to stop jiggling after the last touch. I took 100s of moon photos in the last month before realizing this — but now that I’ve seen it, I can't un-see it. 😜 At 60×, that thing is DANCING for several seconds before settling down.

(And yet think about how many things are “prescribed” for pain that are essentially just … pleasant!)

This one goes to dork-factor 9. If you’re not interested in the details, there's a plain English intro and conclusion. But the details are the POINT. If you followed because you want to learn how to think about the science of pain, this is what you signed up for. 🙂

I wrote an article loooong that hypothesizes about links between respiration and pain. It’s an oddball in my library, though! At odds with my own modern skepticism. Probably doesn't really hold up. But I haven't taken it down either. 😜

www.painscience.com/respiration_...

Sorry for a slow reaction—too many full inboxes! I’ve covered posturology (etc) a lot over the years and I'm generally extremely skeptical:

www.painscience.com/posture

But I don’t know much about PRI specifically. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Glad you got some relief, though, however it happened!

You'll have to tell me what "PRI" is I’m afraid. As plugged in as I am to the world of physical/pain medicine … there are literally THOUSANDS of acronyms and named treatment ideas in this business (and new ones all the time).

Long-term chronic pain is where a lot of my professional focus is, and personal too. I am also a chronic pain patient:

tryeverything.substack.com/p/its-like-l...

VR? Literally immersive?

Indeed. It is … immersive.

🤣

I occasionally a publish personal stuff that has nothing to do with pain.

OR DOES IT?!