This year has seen an amazing outpouring of useful information for patients and practitioners alike. We are only 1.5 months through the year and I feel 1.5 times smarter than I was last year because of all the great posts, articles, and videos people are producing. I think there were some serious New Year’s Resolutions made. And in my own, I want to bring you all pertinent information that you get use to improve your movement, decrease pain, or improve your training.

We are all strapped for cash. Even Donald Trump thinks so. So when you look at this info-graphic provided by Force Therapeutics your brain will likely implode (this is one level above explode in my book). Knowing that only 1.8% of all instances of back pain went to physical therapy as their entry point into health care is mind-numbing. This so-called Direct Access that the APTA has been fighting for shows it’s true colors here. Also, I find it crazy that the cost of every incident of spine pain (surgical and non-surgical) in this country costs the health care system a luxury vehicle (~$29,000 per incident). We can do better than this.

Speaking of saving money in health care, how bout them ACLs. Here’s a brief abstract saying that different results of different manual tests (cheap) are pretty good at diagnosing if certain types of ACL tears are present without radiographs (ex$pen$ive). Combine this with a recent study comparing early vs. late performance of ACL repair vs no surgery at all for acute ACL tears and I think we’ve found some cash-o-la (it’s been estimated that there are over 100,000 ACL repairs in this country per year at an average cost of $35,000 total per surgery and recovery).

In other knee related news. The ITB continues to be a hot topic. Here, Kinetic Revolution talks about the damn ITB and why it gets “tight” or even if it gets “tight”. There is a good point made that it’s not that just the ITB gets tight, but that there are biomechanical faults that lead to compensations in the kinetic chain.

Poor movement is usually the cause of  many ailments like back pain or knee pain, but poor movement can do more than just cause pain. It can cause your golf swing to suffer. As the Titleist Performance Institute and Greg Lehman of thebodymechanic.ca have discussed in length, certain movement patterns should be observed during the golf swing for optimal power and distance to be generated. They may disagree with what deficient movements will do to the swing, but some healthy discussion is always appreciated within the healthcare community. This link is for an e-book by Dr. Greg Lehman that discusses the X-factor’s and X-factor stretch’s affect (or possible affect) on the golf swing, and also some possible training methods for the recreational low and high handicapped golfer.

Finally, here’s my version of 50 Shades of Gray. Cook that is. Here’s a little ditty about, what else, dysfunctional movement patterns (did I mention Gray helped develop the screening tools that the Titleist Performance Institute uses??). I’m literally watching the first video portion of this post again and just wondering if one day I will ever be this smart.

Always Evolve,

Mike