Car Crashes and Research To Go Along With It (Part Two)

The Chiropractic Forward Podcast: Evidence-based Chiropractic Advocacy

CF 176: Car Crashes and Research To Go Along With It (Part Two) Today we’re going to continue to talk about car wreck research. It’s good stuff and useful for all clinics and docs that deal with personal injury patients. But first, here’s that sweet sweet bumper music

OK, we are back and you have found the Chiropractic Forward Podcast where we are making evidence-based chiropractic fun, profitable, and accessible while we make you and your patients better all the way around. We’re the fun kind of research. Not the stuffy, high-brow kind of research. We’re research talk over a couple of beers. I’m Dr. Jeff Williams and I’m your host for the Chiropractic Forward podcast. If you haven’t yet I have a few things you should do.

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You have found yourself smack dab in the middle of Episode #176 Now if you missed last week’s episode, we talked about Car crashes and awesome research around that topic. Part one I guess. Today’s episode is pretty much part two. So, make sure you don’t miss that info. Keep up with the class. On the personal end of things….. On the personal side of things, we are still going down the path towards having the medical entity completed. I made a hire that I feel confident in. The nurse practitioner was referred to me by another nurse practitioner here in town who was his preceptor or teacher for his clinical hours when he was going through school. She told me that he is super smart, excellent with patients, eager to learn, and his wife is an amazing cook. So I was sold. And just taking the time to get to know him, I’m even more confident that I have made a good decision going forward. The majority of the work on this is going to be in the first 3 to 6 months I think. We have to get systems in place, I have to teach the nurse practitioner the exam I do. How do you teach somebody how to do the exam that an ortho fellowship practitioner does? Well, we shall find out. I’ve already loaned him one of my dr. Stuart McGill books to get started on. I’ve been sharing with him a lot of the information that I learned in the Neuromusculoskeletal program, I’ve talked to him about McKenzie protocols and migrating the disc, and started him on the path of different ways to think of chronic pain. Including the up-regulated and sensitized central nervous system as well as the biopsychosocial aspect of chronic pain. Yellow flags, words matter, limiting MRIs, and all of the associated Tom Foolery. He was unfamiliar with quite a bit of what I have been teaching him and showing him. But very receptive and very interested in learning about that side of pain and newer ways of thinking about it and approaching it. I think we’re going to be a great team. Outside of that part of my life, I’ve started with the book launch. Not really the launch itself as much as getting the book ready for launch and putting together a launch team. What does a launch tram do exactly? Well, let me tell you. Basically, I’m going to be uploading it to Amazon once it’s formatted for it and everything is in place. Then, it’ll be free for the first 3 days. That’s when everyone on my launch team will go download it. Then, leave a review for it…..because my launch team is cool and they know that’s part of the launch process. The free downloads and the Amazon book reviews give the book a little Amazon juice which will propel it up the charts a bit. That way, when the initial 3 days are over, and I can start charging money for it, the Amazon Juice has it set up for success and sales. So, that’s the plan and guess what?? I’d love it if you regular listeners would like to be on my launch team. If so, just send me an email to [e-mail] and make sure you tell me you’re on the launch team. It’s that easy. Or, send me a message through our Facebook group or the Facebook page or through smoke signal. Whatever means you can get me a message that you want to help us, that’ll work for me. It would be rude of me to not thank a couple of folks. I need to thank Dr. Chris Howson and Dr. Steven Roffers for helping me with the editing process. Dr. Howson is the inventor of the Drop Release tool, he’s smarter than hell, and he’s a good person on top of all of that. Go check out the Drop Release tool and show Dr. Howson some love won’t you? Dr. Roffers is the group admin of the Facebook group called Chiropractic Research Alliance with over 8,000 members, he’s a certified medical editor and serves on the editorial boards of 14 journals. Dr. Roffers offered to help me edit the draft as well. So, these two pros need to be thanked and properly recognized for their efforts and their generosity. I appreciate you two and just appreciate you. I honestly thought I’d ask for launch team members and there’d be crickets. In the first post I made on my Facebook properties, I’ve now got about 25 super awesome people that want to help support and promote the project. And in the process, they’re supporting and promoting evidence-based, patient-centered healthcare. It’s a win-win and I thank you all. More to come as I get further down the road. Now, on with the research. CHIROUP ADVERTISEMENT As I mentioned last week, this podcast episode was inspired by a recent episode of the Chiropractic Science podcast hosted by Dean Smith. It was episode number 55. His guest was Dr. Michael Freeman who I talked about in last week’s episode. These papers are papers they talked about on that episode so, if you want it from the horse’s mouth, go over to Chiropractic Science and find the recent episode with Dr. Michael Freeman and hit play. Then come back here and get my take on it. Now let me pause just a second and say that if you haven’t jumped into personal injury, don’t. Unless you plan on getting the education it takes to do a good job. Take courses. Make yourself the expert. Know your worth. It pays well but the stakes are high for your patients. You have to deal with attorneys. You might have to testify under oath in court. Do you REALLY want to do that if you’re education and experience are not up to snuff? When I jumped in back in 2007, I had a basic Chiro education but I was not specialized in car wrecks or whiplash. I could have been better. So I made myself better. I recognized my shortfalls and I filled the gaps. I got the Advanced Certification in whiplash biomechanics and Traumatology through the SPINE Institute out in San Diego, CA. I got the certification from the Personal Injury Institute through Matthew DeGaetano who was also a Croft Commando. I have attended CE hours on PI specifically. I ended up compiling all of the experience and education into a macro for ChiroTouch. If you want to check that out, go to personalinjurymacro.com but you’re not going to want to buy it unless you’re using ChiroTouch. It’s like gold though if you have ChiroTouch. It’s got all of the Croft stuff in there, the research citations, crash descriptions, risk assessments, the whole thing. Plus all of my customization after I went through the Fellowship for the Neuromusculoskeletal program. IT’s gold, folks. Anyway, my point was that you do your reputation and you do your patients a disservice if you are in the PI arena but you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Plain and simple. It’s lucrative but dammit, get educated or get out. And understand that you’re not going to get 100% on every case. To demonstrate my point, as I said, I’m a specialist now with the Fellowship, I have the cert in whiplash biomechanics and Traumatology, and I’ve been recognized as an expert in whiplash at the District Court level. Because of my macros I created, I can make narrative reports that nobody I’ve met can beat. And YET…..I still don’t get 100% of my bills. Don’t think you’re going to get 100% either. Because that’s the way PI works. Not all cases are created equally. Some fall apart completely. Some attorneys are truly awful people so stay on your toes. Some are amazing people and those are the ones you want to work with. Sometimes, the patient disappears. Sometimes they get in trouble and go to jail. Sometimes the insurance company just won’t budge and the attorney doesn’t feel there’s a strong enough case to go to court on. At those times, you better be willing to wheel and deal. Otherwise, you might get that one bill paid but that attorney won’t be sending you any more clients and guess what? Attorneys talk to each all of the time. They’re mostly all good friends. Some of my best friends professionally are attorneys. Some of my biggest enemies professionally through the years have been attorneys. One still owes me $42,000 and I don’t expect I’ll ever get it out of him because he’s a worthless, useless, terrible human being. But, it’s part of the dangers of swimming in this particular lake. Some of the fish have no souls. But again, some are amazing people that I have forged solid friendships with. I went off the rails a bit there but the point again is this; either get educated and do it at a high level or leave it to others that did actually put the work in to get the extra education. Plain and simple. Item #1 Our first paper is called, “A systematic approach to clinical determinations of causation in symptomatic spinal disk injury following motor vehicle crash trauma”’ by Dr. Michael Freeman, et. al. (Freeman MD 2009) and published in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation back in 2008. Why They Did It This is a really long description of the objective here so follow along and we’ll discuss, “Clinical determinations of causation in cases of intervertebral disk (IVD) injury after a motor vehicle crash (MVC) are often disputed in court settings. No published systematic guidelines exist for making such determinations. This has resulted in nonclinical people determine injury causation and performing the evaluations. This is traditionally a clinical activity. The result is causal determinations that are potentially disconnected from clinical observations of injury. Meaning, when non-clinical people are doing the evaluation, they get it wrong a lot. The purpose of this review was to evaluate the current literature on causation, causal determinations after trauma and intervertebral disk injury after a motor vehicle crash, and to develop a practicable, logical, and literature-based approach to causation determinations of symptomatic intervertebral disk injury after a motor vehicle crash. That was almost all quoted from the paper’s abstract but I tried to make it even more basic and less confusing. What They Found

• The results of the review indicate IVD injury can result from any MVC regardless of magnitude, thus meeting the first criteria of causation, biologic plausibility.
• Individual determinations of causation depend entirely on the temporal association between the collision and the symptom onset (the second criterion) and a lack of a more probable explanation for the symptoms (the third).
• When these causal elements are met, clinicians can assert causation on a “more probable than not” or “reasonable probability” basis.
• You may have heard me mention I’m currently undergoing the Forensics Diplomate program right now. That is legal speak there. Probably meaning ‘greater than a 50% chance.”

Wrap It Up For the conclusion, they say, “Because of a lack of an established or reliable relationship between collision force and the probability of IVD injury the investigation of collision parameters is not a useful adjunct to causal determinations.” Item #2 Our last one today is called “Diagnostic Accuracy of Videofluoroscopy for Symptomatic Cervical Spine Injury Following Whiplash Trauma” by Freeman et. al. (Freeman MD 2020) and published in the International Journal Of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2020 and that’s still got some smoke! Now….if you don’t know, what is Videofluoroscopic examination? It’s basically x-rays (and video) that are dynamic. X-rays that are moving. So you can see the patient go into cervical flexion. It’s cool as hell. But you can accurately see when there is ligament injury or ligament laxity as well because in real time, you can observe the one vertebra slide forward on the one under. It’s crazy and a bit spooky. When you see one vertebra slip forward on the one underneath as the patient goes into cervical flexion, it’ll make you anxious in your belly. It might make you pee a little. Anyway, look it up. See if you can find some videos through your Google machine. Why They Did It Intervertebral instability is a relatively common finding among patients with chronic neck pain after whiplash trauma. Videofluoroscopy (VF) of the cervical spine is a potentially sensitive diagnostic tool for evaluating instability, as it offers the ability to examine relative intervertebral movement over time, and across the entire continuum of voluntary movement of the patient. At the present time, there are no studies of the diagnostic accuracy of Videofluoroscopy for discriminating between injured and uninjured populations. How They Did It

• Symptomatic (injured) study subjects were recruited from consecutive patients with chronic (>6 weeks) post-whiplash pain presenting to medical and chiropractic offices equipped with Videofluoroscopy facilities.
• Asymptomatic (uninjured) volunteers were recruited from family and friends of patients.
• Three statistical models were utilized to assess the sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values (PPV and NPV) of positive Videofluoroscopy findings to correctly discriminate between injured and uninjured subjects.

What They Found

• A total of 196 subjects (119 injured, 77 uninjured) were included in the study.
• Videofluoroscopic examination of the cervical spine provides a high degree of diagnostic accuracy for the identification of vertebral instability in patients with chronic pain stemming from whiplash trauma.

Wrap It Up “Videofluoroscopic examination of the cervical spine provides a high degree of diagnostic accuracy for the identification of vertebral instability in patients with chronic pain stemming from whiplash trauma.” Alright, that’s it. Y’all be safe. Keep changing our profession from your little corner of the world. Keep taking care of yourselves and everyone around you. Tough times are upon us but, the sun will shine again. Trust it, believe it, count on it. Let’s get to the message. Same as it is every week. Store Remember the evidence-informed brochures and posters at chiropracticforward.com.

The Message I want you to know with absolute certainty that when Chiropractic is at its best, you can’t beat the risk vs reward ratio because spinal pain is primarily a movement-related pain and typically responds better to movement-related treatment rather than chemical treatments like pills and shots. When compared to the traditional medical model, research and clinical experience show us patients can get good to excellent results for headaches, neck pain, back pain, and joint pain to name just a few. It’s safe and cost-effective can decrease surgeries & disability and we do it through conservative, non-surgical means with minimal hassle to the patient. And, if the patient treats preventatively after initial recovery, we can usually keep it that way while raising the overall level of health! Key Point: At the end of the day, patients should have the guarantee of having the best treatment that offers the least harm. When it comes to non-complicated musculoskeletal complaints…. That’s Chiropractic! Contact Send us an email at dr dot williams at chiropracticforward.com and let us know what you think of our show and tell us your suggestions for future episodes. Feedback and constructive criticism is a blessing and so are subscribes and excellent reviews on podcast platforms. We know how this works by now. If you value something, you have to share it, interact with it, review it, talk about it from time to time, and actively hit a few buttons to support it here and there when asked. It really does make a big difference. Connect We can’t wait to connect with you again next week. From the Chiropractic Forward Podcast flight deck, this is Dr. Jeff Williams saying upward, onward, and forward. Website

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Social Media Links https://www.facebook.com/chiropracticforward/ Chiropractic Forward Podcast Facebook GROUP https://www.facebook.com/groups/1938461399501889/ Twitter Tweets by Chiro_Forward YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtc-IrhlK19hWlhaOGld76Q iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/chiropractic-forward-podcast-chiropractors-practicing/id1331554445?mt=2 Player FM Link https://player.fm/series/2291021 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-chiropractic-forward-podcast-chiropractors-practicing-through TuneIn https://tunein.com/podcasts/Health–Wellness-Podcasts/The-Chiropractic-Forward-Podcast-Chiropractors-Pr-p1089415/ About the Author & Host Dr. Jeff Williams – Fellow of the International Academy of Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine – Chiropractor in Amarillo, TX, Chiropractic Advocate, Author, Entrepreneur, Educator, Businessman, Marketer, and Healthcare Blogger & Vlogger Bibliography Freeman MD, C. C., Kohles S, (2009). “A systematic approach to clinical determinations of causation in symptomatic spinal disk injury following motor vehicle crash trauma.” PM R. 1(10): 951-956. Freeman MD, K. E., Rosa S, Gatterman B, Strommer E, Leith W, (2020). “Diagnostic Accuracy of Videofluoroscopy for Symptomatic Cervical Spine Injury Following Whiplash Trauma.” Int J Environ Res Public Health 17(5): 1693.

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