Patient safety

Big Procedures, Big Problems. Little Procedures, Little Problems

I’ll never forget my brother-in-law’s comments when our kids were young. Having older kids at the time, he told us, “Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems”. Today I’ll modify his advice to “Big procedures, big problems. Little procedures, little problems”. Let’s dig in. The Trend Towards Minimally Invasive Care Minimally invasive in medicine…read more

CCI and DMX: Can You Still Have Instability with a Normal DMX? What Is a False Negative?

You can’t beat movement-based imaging for finding Cervical Instability. However, all imaging has a false-negative rate. Let’s discuss that and learn about instability in the process. Let’s dig in. What Is Instability? If you had to choose a single concept of what goes wrong in the spine as the most important thing you should know,…read more

Antidepressants and Back Pain

One of the hot topics in treating chronic pain is that we doctors should prescribe antidepressants. Why? Well as I used to say, many doctors view patients with chronic low back pain as crazy or lazy. Let’s dig into how well antidepressants work for back pain and dig in a bit more about why your…read more

The Steroid and Anesthetic Trick or Treat

I’ve discussed more times than I can count that the high-dose corticosteroids used every day by physicians in joints, tendons, and spinal injections are like a Halloween trick. This morning we’ll go over a survey that shows just how widespread these injections are these days. Let’s dig in. The Survey A survey was taken of…read more

The NSAID Apples to Apples Dilemma

One of the things we often do to help patient outcomes before, during, and after a regenerative medicine procedure is to restrict certain medications we know can hurt healing or the cells we’re using. One of the more common things we do is to take patients off NSAID drugs. However, that often creates a conundrum…read more

1 in 8 Orthopedic Surgeries Lead to Heart Damage

Sometimes a paper comes along that breaks my brain. This is one of those research studies which is in the form of a position paper published by the American Heart Association. It basically says that some people are getting heart damage during routine surgery. So let’s dig in because when I first read it yesterday,…read more

ANOTHER Study Shows Fusion Is an Expensive Tip

What if a very invasive spine procedure became common to treat degenerative disease despite a high complication rate and multiple studies showing it was ineffective? This would make little common sense, right? However, that’s what has happened with Lumbar Fusion. Now yet another new study shows it doesn’t work. Let’s dig in. What Is DDD…read more

The Bench Scientist False Dilemma

Credit: Shutterstock I’ve blogged a few times about the widening rift between a handful of media-savvy bench scientists and physicians who use regenerative medicine techniques to help patients avoid invasive orthopedic surgery. This past few weeks we’ve seen several unscientific things in the news and in bench science blogs about PRP and Bone Marrow Concentrate.…read more