 So I'm the spine surgeon for the Steadman Clinic and Vale. I also am a chiropractor from years ago and I still maintain my license. I maintain only a practice of spinal problems, neck, mid-back and lower back. I don't do any other orthopedics. I've been doing that now for about 30 years. We deal with injuries and with degenerative changes and with failures of ligaments and tendons and bones and muscles in the spine. Well, in general day-to-day practice, the spine doesn't go through enough major forces to create significant injury in one or two maneuvers. But when you become athletic and you put the spine through greater amounts of stress, a single motion can create an injury, typically to a bone in the spine, something called the par's interarticularis is pretty common, or to a joint, something called the facet in the back of the spine. And more commonly, an injury can occur to the disc, which is the front part of the cushion of the spine. It's education, training and certain activity avoidance. So the spine, unfortunately, is in very poor mechanical alignment when you BLT and that's bend, load, twist. Those three maneuvers at the same time put so much stress on the disc that that is the typical position you'll get into when you tear a portion of the back of the disc. And that's quite common. We see that 10 times a day in the office. So how do you prevent that? Well, if you reduce one of the three letters, BLT, if you bend and twist but don't load or bend and load but don't twist, then you reduce the amount of stress on the disc and the chance of injury is lessened. The other thing that you can do is train. So if you have core strength, if your abdominal muscles can really create increased intra-abdominal pressure, that makes the spine stiffer and less likely to injure. Of course, you know, the prototypical picture is the guy with a six-pack abdomen and he's probably going to have great core strength. But if you have enough muscle strength to create increased abdominal pressure, which everybody should have, and then maintain that pressure during the cycle of the activity that you're doing, people will talk about engaging the core. And engaging the core is really tightening the abdominal muscles to increase the intra-abdominal pressure that stiffens the spine, lessens the load on the spine, and reduces spine injuries. The question is how long can you maintain that pressure before you eventually have to give? And if you're still doing that activity and you fatigue those muscles, then you're going to lose that protection. I have some doubts about the current young population and injury prevention because they're becoming more extreme in their sports, flinging themselves off cliffs when they're snowboarding, taking mountain bike impacts that are greater than the normal load they should, even barefoot water skiing, things of that nature. You're putting more stress on the spine, so I'm worried about more injury. And I think if we can educate these athletes to have better core strength and to pick more wisely the impacts that they take, they'll be less injuries. Well, we want to try and, number one, prevent the injuries from occurring. And if they occur, get these patients back as quickly as we can and back to full function. So we've always had that focus and not only is the focus in clinical treatment but also in research so we can understand how better to take care of these injuries and how to prevent them. That's the whole purpose of the Research Institute. Well, we see a lot of athletes that are Olympic and professional athletes. And these athletes have significant injuries and we want to get them back to their sport to be able to participate at an Olympic level or a professional level back to where they were before, even hopefully better than they were before. So that's our goal, to be able to do the research, to understand how to do the right care, to be able to prevent and to be able to treat them and get them back to the high level they were at. Our goals are not to try and prevent a problem from getting worse but to try and improve the problem so that the patient, whether they're a bowler or they want to work in their garden or whether they shoe horses to get them back to doing that activity. So the experience with treating world-class athletes trickles down to every single patient we see to be able to get them back to what they want to do.