Increasing complexity

“The thing about back pain is that it's mostly mental, right?” So says John McEnroe, the tennis player, as he comments on a Wimbledon match that (naughtily) I'm watching while writing this. Perhaps McEnroe reads the BMJ, where as the years pass back pain does indeed seem to be changing from a condition thought of primarily in physical terms to one considered to be predominantly psychosocial. Now we may be about to watch the transformation of menorrhagia.

A group from Edinburgh and Glasgow has studied how it is …