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Music can relieve pain, but what kind of music? A new study from McGill University, published in Pain, found that music with greater emotional depth reduced pain, while intense, forceful music increased it. The effect seemed to depend on how much listeners enjoyed the music. The practical advice: choose music you love, rather than music labeled relaxing or therapeutic.

A genome-wide study published in Nature Medicine found that fibromyalgia shares genetic risk factors with chronic pain conditions, IBS, PTSD, and sleep disturbances. This supports treating these overlapping conditions as one problem of a hyperexcitable nervous system rather than as separate diseases, using a multidisciplinary approach that combines psychological therapies with medications, injections, and neurostimulation.