Boring beats clever
Walking, sleeping, loading tissue slowly, not panicking. These are the things with evidence behind them, and they make worse articles than a gadget. I write about them anyway.
About
A friend bought a $450
massage gun.
His shoulder had hurt for two years. The gun lived on a shelf for about a month, next to a foam roller, three resistance bands and a posture brace, all bought for the same shoulder. The shoulder still hurt. Nobody had told him what the evidence actually says, so he kept buying objects.
The gap
Devices are sold as answers to questions they can't answer
Most of what he bought was fine. A foam roller is a good object. The problem was the framing: each purchase was presented as the thing that would fix the shoulder, and none of them were, and the twenty minutes of chin nods and wall slides that might have helped never came up because nobody was selling it.
That gap is the whole reason this site exists. Not because recovery gear is worthless. Some of it is genuinely useful and pleasant, and I own a few of those things. But the category is priced and marketed as if it were treatment, and the people buying it deserve a clearer account of what they are getting.
Who writes this
One person, and not a clinician
I'm not a physician, a physical therapist, or a chiropractor. There is no stock photo of a man in a white coat on this page because there is no man in a white coat. Most sites in this niche imply otherwise through a badge or a byline they bought, and that is the single most common lie in health affiliate publishing.
What I am is someone who sat in a chair for a decade, trained around it, and got tired of not being able to tell which advice was load-bearing. I read the guidelines. I read the reviews. I read the spec sheets, which is more informative than it sounds. When a topic needs clinical judgement I don't have, the article says so and points at the guideline rather than inventing a verdict.
The method page is unusually specific about what each kind of article rests on, including which gear pieces I have never touched. If that isn't enough authority for you, that's a fair conclusion to draw, and the medical disclaimer spells out the limit.
Working rules
Four habits, imperfectly kept
Say where the evidence runs out
Most recovery claims sit somewhere between "one small trial" and "nobody checked". I try to put the sentence in the right place on that scale instead of rounding up.
No borrowed authority
There is no doctor on this site, no clinical advisory board, and no "medically reviewed" badge. If I ever get a clinician to read something, I will say which clinician and what they said.
Write to one person
Usually someone tired, mildly sore, and not in the mood for a lecture. That constraint has killed more bad paragraphs than any style guide.
Money
Affiliate links, and what they don't buy
If you buy something through a link here, the retailer pays me a percentage. You pay the same price. That is the entire revenue model: no sponsored posts, no display ads, no brand has previewed an article, and no brand has ever asked me to.
The model has an obvious flaw. A site that recommends everything earns more than one that recommends three things and tells you to skip the rest. My only real defence is that this site keeps publishing the reasons not to buy, including a piece that concludes a $700 product is mostly a nice feeling.
Full affiliate disclosureContact
Corrections welcome, pitches aren't
If something here is wrong, tell me and I'll fix it. If you disagree with an argument, I'd like to hear that too. Guest post offers, link insertions and "collaboration" emails go unanswered, not out of rudeness but because there is no version of yes.