 You are listening to This Week in Chiropractic. Here are the headlines for the week of March 25th, 2021. In pop culture, you can now find Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in your chiropractic office according to a new ad. Reese's announced the return of its peanut butter eggs for Easter with a strange TV spot. Will Arnett of Arrested Development fame voices the spot saying, They're literally everywhere grocery stores, supermarkets, gas stations, and chiropractor's offices. The Foundation for Chiropractic Progress revealed their new 30-second chiropractic TV commercial set to air during the 2021 Summer Olympics. This historic commercial features Dr. Erika Witter-Davis, a sports chiropractor and former Olympian and national champion. The ad will serve to both inspire athletes and others to consider a career as a doctor of chiropractic. Viewers are encouraged to visit the new website BeyondThePain.org to find a chiropractor or learn how to become one. It will air five times on NBC Networks during the 2021 Summer Olympics in July. In news, the battle over chiropractor's ability to do routine X-rays is headed for court in British Columbia. A group of BC chiropractors is accusing their professional regulator of unfairly limiting their ability to do business. At the heart of the fight is a policy change from the College of Chiropractors of BC, which says chiropractors are no longer allowed to perform routine and repeat X-rays because of a lack of evidence supporting any benefit to patients. This change has prompted international outrage from some chiropractic groups who argue that regular use of X-rays is safe and fundamental to their work. The American Chiropractic Association suggests you can prevent neck pain with a well-fitted mask. Some ACA members report that their patients who wear protective masks for long hours are frequently experiencing these common musculoskeletal conditions. A blog article at the ACA's consumer website, HandsDownBetter.org, suggests that the mask can limit the lower field of vision, particularly if they are not well-fitted, causing people to tuck in their chins, shift their body position, and hold their necks and posture stiffly to maintain a line of sight. In research, a new article in the European Spine Journal recommends clinical reporting for MRI reports to avoid catastrophization effects. The study compared routine factual explanations of patients' MRI reports with focused clinical reporting that avoids potential catastrophizing terminologies. From the conclusion, routine MRI reports produce a negative perception and poor functional outcomes in low back pain. Focused clinical reporting had significant benefits, including reduced severity of disease and less surgery. Those are the headlines for this week in chiropractic for March 25, 2021. For links to these stories and more, visit exploringchiropractic.com. Well, what do you think of these stories? Let's go through these and discuss a little bit. I just could not believe this ad with Will Arnett. You guys know him from Maristad Development and the Lego Movie Batman. Just great. We've hit them somewhere you'll never find. Grocery stores, gas stations, your chiropractor's office, and he does say it with a change in tone. I mean, not exactly the image we're going for, right? Trying to be health professionals, encouraging wellness, but hilarious and hey, any exposure is good exposure, right? I just can't, what do you think? Why do people come up with chiropractor's office to sell Easter eggs? I did, however, really like the commercial from the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress, F4CP.org, that's going to air at the Summer Olympics. Now, I've heard about this. There's a big capital campaign. My understanding is to fund this. It's a 30-second commercial featuring this doctor who used to be a sprinter, national champion, Olympian in early 2000s, Dr. Witter Davis, then went on to become a chiropractor at Southern California University of Health Sciences. She is a diplomate of the American Board of Sports Physicians and a CSCS, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. I thought it was great, you know, obviously getting an athlete to promote the profession, not just for patients, but for future chiropractors, I think is a great approach. You know, it's not trying to talk about anything in the profession that can become questionable and controversial, just showing her running, staying fit, staying active, and then showing her in the office. I thought it was well done. She looks like a great representative. And now a new website, BeyondThePain.org, certainly people will take question with that. What do you think? To emphasize pain. I certainly think that we help with pain. I certainly think that is something that we should actually focus on, if only initially, right? We do want to remove pain. That's what patients want, isn't it? Don't they want to get out of pain initially? But I don't know if that's certainly not the only thing we want to be talking and putting in our message, but lots of universities putting their stamp on this website, obviously to get new students to come and pay them lots of money to become a chiropractor. I think it's a great ad. I'll be very interested to see what the results are. Sharing it five times during the Olympics has not buried many. I thought at one point they were going to do this during the Super Bowl. Now that would be interesting to see if they could do it on the Super Bowl. That would cost a lot. Controversy is at the forefront in Canada right now. I heard about these amendments, these changes to policy. In fact, classmate of mine listed on the subluxation Slayer's website where they try to call out these evidence-informed and more progressive chiropractors who were trying to make change. I saw his name there. I think the evidence shows that routine spinal imaging is not warranted. At least it doesn't show it yet. All you CBP followers, okay, maybe, but let's wait for the evidence to come out. I've been waiting. I've seen Deed Harrison talk, and that was probably going on four or five years ago, so they had a big study coming out that year. Still haven't seen it. The confusion you hear though, what have you guys heard? What have you heard on the social media forums and everything? What I'm hearing is that they're trying to take away our ability to X-ray. I want to refund for all of my X-ray equipment. That's not what's happening, is it? I mean, the worry that that could happen? Okay, I understand that. But what they're saying is let's limit X-rays now to ruling out red flags to detecting suspected pathology when warranted by the clinical exam. And let's not do routine and repeat radiography with all of our patients for every visit. That's what they're saying. They're not taking away the ability to X-ray. Now you may have a case if you say, well, it's a slippery slope. This is just the first step. I don't know. I don't know if that's the case. Could be. But we'll see how this goes. It's not a good look to see a division in the profession with these different groups kind of fighting each other. But what I did like about this article is that they acknowledged, they admitted that there is this division and there is one side of chiropractors who would advocate for what they describe as evidence-based practice targeting the musculoskeletal system. On the other are the vitalists. To see that in a very well-known Canadian news organization, I think is actually pretty hopeful that this is becoming seen. People are becoming aware that not all chiropractors are trying to just X-ray everybody and make some money. Now I'm not so sure about the ACAs article. Now this isn't from the ACA website. This is the consumer-facing webpage hands down better. And they say you could prevent neck pain with a well-fitted mask. Now I don't know. Look, I've been having some TMJ pain first time in my life. It's been about a month or two now. Saw the dentist, got X-rays, nothing going on there. Routine X-rays, not specifically for that, but just asked them to look. Could it be the mask? Ah, you know, I read this and I thought, gosh, okay. Yeah, maybe all these muscles are kind of doing things they're not used to. Can you prevent neck pain by fitting the mask better? I don't know. If anything, now they make the argument that it's blocking the lower field of vision. If anything, people are wearing their masks down here. They're not blocking their field of vision. I've not seen anybody with it above their eyes except on the planes and they're trying to sleep. So, you know, this type of stuff is questionable, but hey, some people are seeing it in their practices. A few steps here. Look, we do want people to fit their masks well, right? I think we're headed into the tail end of this pandemic. Not that it's going away anytime soon, but I think removing masks is going to become more acceptable. But still, when they're necessary, you want them to be well-fitted. Okay, so let's teach people how to fit their mask. I don't know that we need to make it claim that it reduces neck pain. I didn't mention this in the headlines, but ACA Virtual Day on the Hill is coming up, May 6, 2021. You can register now. I went once to NCLC, did the whole campaigning on the Hill, lobbying, whatever you call it. I did not like it. I did not know what to say to these senators and representatives to convince them of something that to me is obvious. So, doing it virtually, I'm very curious what this is going to be like. I haven't read through this, so what do you think? Are you going to attend the ACA Virtual Day on the Hill? Let me know what you hope to do. I haven't read through to see how you're actually going to address people. A lot of being just something I was not bred to do. So, I appreciate those who do spend time to do it and know how, because I just don't. Not much research for this week. A couple came out just yesterday, I think, that we'll talk about in the next week. This one's a good paper on catastrophization effects of an MRI report on patient and surgeon. The benefit of clinical reporting. I haven't gotten access to this one, so I haven't read through to really understand, what are they talking about when they say catastrophizing terminologies. Someone posted shared a list of these things, like saying things like, oh, your spine is the age of a 65-year-old or your discs are just completely gone, completely flat. That stuff makes sense. There's no SIBO effect there. What's the alternative to that? What is the better way to approach these things? That is what I would like to see, because as someone pointed out, a lot of the alternative phrases, not from this paper, but from another resource, did not seem to be factual, did not seem to be accurate, which can later on lead to other problems. Again, I don't see, in the abstract at least, I don't see any quantitative measurement of the improvements here. It looks like they were measuring pain scores of EAS. PSEQ-2, I'm not sure, and then the short-form Functional 12 questionnaire. First phase was they took 44 low-back pain patients, told them factual explanations as usual, and said, your MRI findings are normal. Then they developed these catastrophizing terminologies, and then they did another group where they, and this is what I'm confused, and I need to read the whole paper, they blinded the assessors, and I believe they had them relay these non-catastrophizing terminologies without knowing anything about the case. Some questions about this study. I'm going to look forward to getting my hands on it and reading through it, but I think we do need to be aware of the words we're using with patients, and definitely need to not cause a nocebo effect towards them. That's it for this week. I do hope that I'll be back next week. Just like Thursdays are becoming a good time for me to record, as long as I can get other work done. I have started some podcast interviews again. I'm not sure if this will be my old feed for exploring chiropractic. I might be starting another one maybe a monthly about chiropractic legends. Just interviewed Leonard Fay. Probably will have Dr. Terry Yocum coming up here in just a bit. That's it for me. You can follow me at exploring chiro on all of the social media channels. Follow the podcast. Go listen to some old episodes. Let me know if those are being downloaded again. Interviews of students at different schools, interviews with doctors, even some controversial medical doctors who are anti-chiropractic. Yeah, I even went there. I like having conversations with people I disagree with. If you disagree with me, let me know. Leave a comment down below. What you think of the show. Tell me what you think I should be talking about. Tell me why I'm wrong on my opinions about these news articles, research articles and current events. And we'll see you hopefully again next week. Thanks for following me on This Week in Chiropractic.