A Government task force now says all younger postmenopausal women should get checked if their risk of a broken bone is the same or greater than the average 65-year-old woman. Factors that can increase risk include low weight, certain drugs, smoking, heavy alcohol use and a parent who broke a hip.

Poor health literacy -- an individual's ability to seek, understand, and utilize health information -- has been linked with limited self-management skills, but the influence of health literacy has not previously been investigated in low back pain.

An Australian study investigating this found that among patients with low back pain, negative beliefs and behaviors -- such as believing their problem will not get better -- are important correlates of increased disability.

They also found that patients named health professionals as their primary source for information about low back pain and favored physiotherapists and chiropractors over [medical] care physicians for specialized information.

A watchdog group is urging a federal investigation of vaccine pricing polices of two large drugmakers. The two companies, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, give discounts on some vaccines to physician healthcare groups -- as long as they buy all their vaccines from the same company.

[So...does the same logic apply to insurance companies who "give discounts" to those who contract with one type of provider over another?  --Ed]

The public can now review data on the quality of outpatient care provided by individual hospitals at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Hospital Compare website HERE.

"What's the difference in a DC and a PT?"  I recently came across an article seeking to answer this question.  I thought this a good question and will use excerpts from that article and from Texas Law to attempt to highlight the differences even more accurately for Texas....

Nearly one in 10 adults under age 65 gets radiation exposure from cardiac imaging over a given three-year period.

Researchers analyzed more than 90,000 nonelderly adults who underwent at least one cardiac imaging procedure and...found 89.0 per 1,000 received an effective dose of ionizing radiation greater than the background radiation from natural sources.  Another 3.3 per 1,000 got cumulative annual doses above the upper limit for occupational exposure..."

"Extrapolating these results to the U.S. population in the same age range suggested that 636,000 people would be at risk from high cumulative effective doses of ionizing radiation from cardiac imaging, which the researchers called 'considerable'."

Headache is the third most common presenting complaint of chiropractic patients.  Eighty-one percent of headache patents are treated solely in the chiropractic office with only 18% co-managed and 6% referred.  It is the most common (77%) non-subluxation based diagnosis made by chiropractors.

New research continues to confirm the importance of a simple flexion rotation test in the differential diagnoses of headaches.  Many headache cases are often similar in terms of presenting symptom and the FRT has demonstrated in multiple research studies to be highly sensitive to identifying cervicogenic headache from migraine and multiple headache forms."

It is common to have patients comment that they feel increased pain and stiffness accompanying changes in the weather.  Some claim to be virtual weather stations with accuracy surpassing the local meteorologist.  But is there any science to support these comments?  The answer is 'yes'...

School screening for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis has been criticized as resulting in over-referrals for radiography and having low predictive values. Two studies from the May and June 2010 issues of Spine evaluated past and contemporary methods of school scoliosis screening.