Welcome to another edition of Function's pain science round-up: your window into the latest clinical evidence, research studies, and experimental findings for anyone who's found themselves in the world of pain.

Let's dive in.

It's well-documented that pain and relief generalize across our experiences with them. That is, past experiences with pain and relief influence future experiences with pain and relief. Using two powerful forces in pain and relief—the placebo effect and its opposite, the nocebo effect, which is when believing something might cause pain results in more pain—one novel study dug into how pain and relief generalizes across types of pain. It found that if participants were made to feel a placebo or nocebo effect alongside heat pain, they felt the same effect when they were later subjected to pressure pain.

It's commonly believed that poor neck posture results in disc herniation and, therefore, neck pain. Alongside a mountain of research that calls the relationship between disc herniation and pain into question, a new study calls into question the relationship between poor neck posture and disc herniation, too. Looking at over 800,000 Danish workers (for example, dentists, hairdressers, and carpenters), this study found that awkward neck postures and movements, measured using accelerometers, did not increase the risk of disc herniation.

For chronic, non-specific low back pain, a meta-analysis revealed that mental health care, pain education, and physical therapy are most effective at reducing pain and improving function when combined, rather than done on their own.

For nearly 1,000 civil servants in Brazil, a study found workers who were bullied were almost twice as likely to be experiencing low back pain. The authors rightly noted that this is correlation, not causation, but also pointed out that the link was strong enough to suggest a causal relationship between workplace bullying and low back pain.

People often opt for surgery as a way to avoid opioid use, but a new meta-analysis calls this strategy into question. It sought to understand whether patients that had received spinal fusion—one of the most common forms of surgery for chronic low back pain—were later taking long-term opioid medication. It found that more than 1 in 3 patients were.