 Let's go. This is Twitch, this week in chiropractic. I'm Dr. Nathan Cash and your host. Got a little Bunderberg beer here. If you haven't tried it, go check it out at your local supermarket, delicious Australian family owned and really good stuff. This is week two of my experiment of doing a weekly chiropractic news show. And just something I'm trying out, create another podcast, do live stream, trying to figure out what's going on. This is really just practice for me right now to collect some interesting news articles or things in popular culture in the community of of our profession that we can talk about and share online and get some feedback, get some input and get some thoughts. So this is the week of December 21st, 2020, winding down the year. And maybe I'll launch this earlier on early in January to make it something more official. As I did last week, starting off with something a little bit more lighthearted, what we've got. So if you're not part of a number of Facebook groups, there's so many chiropractic groups that I can't imagine you be in all of them. But the smart chiropractor is a group as well as a service that you can pay for run by Jeffrey Lang maid of the evidence based chiropractor and Jason Deitch of chiropractic marketing fame. And just this week, they posted a video from Steve Wozniak, one of the co founders of Apple computer. If you don't know by now, I'm a huge Apple fan, a big Apple geek, somewhat of a fanboy, to be honest. And I saw this and I thought, what the heck did they rope him into doing this? Well, and it's clear there's a service called cameo cameo I think.com where you can pay celebrities and athletes and other well known people to record a message, whether it's a birthday message for a friend, a holiday message for a group of friends or in this case, a message to basically to subscribers of the smart chiropractic smart chiropractor service. And I just thought that was pretty cool. But what really interested me that I did not know was that Steve Wozniak's grandfather was a chiropractor. I had no idea, even though I've listened to his, his biography, which is really quite interesting. The thing that stands out the most to me is when he mentions how angry his father was to get a ride in his Porsche and see checks for hundreds of thousand dollars laying on the floor of his car because he was, I mean, if you've ever listened to Steve Wozniak, he's one of those geniuses who was just so almost absent minded, but just like so fluid in thought and probably ADHD that when he got a check for a few hundred thousand dollars, he didn't even bother cashing it because to him, that was chump change. And so he's doing this for research, the smart chiropractor organization, you know, probably paid him a couple hundred dollars that goes to charity. And then he records that message. Really cool. I'm thinking about using it myself. Really cool idea. And so kudos to Jeff Langmaid and Jason Deitch for that great idea. Some news, Metscape has an article that my wife sent me. This is about a medical student and so not specifically chiropractic related, but we'll see why I found it so interesting. A medical student finds actual buried treasure worth millions. So here's a story way back in 2010. A Santa Fe art collector hid a chest of jewelry and art somewhere out in the wilderness. He personally, he really enjoyed getting outdoors. He found that it was helpful for him to get some exercise, spend some time in nature and wanted to encourage people to do the same. And so what he did is he took this box with potentially millions of dollars worth of jewelry, art, other valuables and he hid it in an undisclosed location out in the wilderness somewhere in the Rocky Mountains is one of the only things he disclosed. And then in one of his books, he's written a bunch of memoirs. He wrote a poem, which contained clues to the location of this box. And apparently hundreds of thousands of people, according to some reports, like 455,000 people have been involved in the search for this buried treasure. And just a couple of weeks ago earlier this year, I should say a medical student named Jonathan, who goes by Jack Stuiff, who's 32 years old, had been spending a lot of his time for years and years searching, joining the crowd to search for this. And he was confident that he knew some clues that other people hadn't found, specifically the person who buried this, Fen, at some point must have revealed where he wished to be buried when he died. And Jack, the medical student, somehow connected that to where the location of the buried treasure would be. And so spent 25 straight days within a very narrow radius, searching for this treasure. And on the 25th day, found it. And it's crazy, he just left it there, went back to his rental car. This was out in the wilderness of Wyoming and just cried. He found it. It's been controversial. People have begun to sue him, claiming that he hacked their email addresses, communications with Fen, the guy who buried it, to figure out where it was buried. There's been, there is a book written on this. There's an article in Outside Magazine covering the discovery of it. And so the book apparently will be coming out later next year, I'm imagining. And Jack himself wrote on Medium, an article about then meeting Forrest Fen, who at the age of 90 passed away earlier this year. Such an incredible story. And again, I do just, I really like the idea that this was what some people thought was a hoax, but all intended to get people outdoors, get people active. Of course, many people have died in pursuit of this, about five or six people have died by falling by their raft, flipping over, getting lost. And so it hasn't been without issue. But really such a cool story. A man named Nitesoul, or Nitesoul has been helping Fen, has been managing his blog and is a documentary filmmaker. And so hopefully we'll see something in the near future talking about this story. But can't you imagine being a chiropractic student, spending your two week break or whatever it is, going out into nature and just spending time searching for a lost buried treasure? And Jack says that he's probably just going to sell all of the treasure to pay off his student loans. He may not even go back to med school. Since he hasn't finished, I don't even think he's even in his clinical years. You know, it's probably a hundred, maybe $200,000 of student loans that he has at this point. If he can sell it all, the rest of it, he's, he's going to be good for at least a few years. So those are some pretty cool stories in the news. Couple of things going on in the profession, some seminars popping up, some events that I wanted to make note of the primary spine practitioner course is open again for its new cohort. It's 2021 cohort. This PSP training program or certification program was started by Michael Schneider and the, and the author of the crisp books. Why am I blanking on his name? Dr. Dan Murphy, Donald Murphy, sorry, who wrote the clinical reasoning and spine pain and took this idea of a primary spine practitioner, which originally was developed by Scott Haldeman, but Dr. Murphy and Michael Schneider took this and actually built a certification program consisting of four units. And these have been in-person courses this year. Of course, they're going to be offered in a virtual online format. They are full weekends, full-time weekends, two to three days, but they occur spaced out over the year starting April, going through December, 2021. And again, this year, they will be offered online. And so you can find that at psp.pit.edu. It is held at the University of Pittsburgh, where Michael Schneider is on faculty. I highly recommend it for recent grads, new grads. First of all, read up about the primary spine practitioner idea, the concept, get the crisp books. I've written about them. I interviewed Donald Murphy on the Exploring Chiropractic podcast a couple of years ago, and he talks about what this means and what it doesn't mean. There's a lot of myths and incorrect information about the PSP that it limits chiropractors. That's not true, but it's really great training to focus on the spine, on low back pain, neck pain, and to learn some skills that would really allow you to be better placed in an evidence-based practice, whether that's in a hospital, in a primary care clinic, or even volunteering with something like World Spine Care, which we'll come back to in a moment. Another event coming up is the Carl Oquiem 2021, which is a virtual conference for the chiropractic community to meet, chat, and share research. If you're not familiar, I mentioned last week, Carl is the Chiropractic Association of Research Leadership. I think that's or maybe Academy, Chiropractic Academy of Research Leadership. It is a cohort of groups led by Craig Cotchuk and others who are trying to foster young researchers to earn their PhDs, to do clinical research. If you pay attention to chiropractic research to the literature, you'll recognize these names. It's people like Catherine Pullman. It is Martha Funabashi, Katie DeLuca, Diana DeCarvalio, Alexander Breen, Eric Rosine is another one in Boston who's in the current cohort. These young researchers gather together, share their research with each other and help each other to do some research projects. The Carl Oquiem basically is going to be a poster session held online. I really appreciate that they're trying to come up with a way for people to meet. What we miss in conferences is the serendipity of the moment. Walking down the hallway, grabbing coffee and, hey, there's Dr. So-and-so who you haven't spoken to or who you've always wanted to introduce yourself to. With Zoom webinars and recorded online virtual summits, you really miss so much of that serendipity. What they're doing is they're trying to create a virtual world. Some of you may be computer nerds and around long enough to be aware of or have heard of Second Life and these other types of games where you're literally building an avatar of yourself to just float around in this virtual existence. You can buy clothes, you go shopping. I think it was shut down in the mid-2000s, but this is so similar, but it's specifically made for this type of event. And so it's going to cost $35 to submit a poster or to be an observer without submitting a poster. Everyone is welcome. Students, early, mid, senior career researchers, clinicians, anyone in the research industry. And it's two days. It's going to be March 2nd and March 3rd around the world. They have other global time zones, so March 3rd and 4th in Australia. And it's going to be a few hours each of those days, but open through that whole time. So you can come in a little bit early, browse around, or you can be there when everybody else is scheduled to be there. And there will be some keynote speakers and then virtual posters. And so what they're doing is using this tool called Virbella, which is a way to gather in this virtual world. And again, specifically for this type of events, and you create your own avatar. And I guess you just walk around. So I downloaded this. You can't join the event yet, but you can create your avatar. And I'm just not sure that I don't think this is really all that necessary. It would be great if you could just, I don't know, use your emoji, you know, on the iPhone, your an emoji of yourself that you've already created, or even the one on Facebook, but have to recreate one. And I mean, the resolution is so low. The options here for hairstyles. I'm just not totally sure, but I guess it'll be fun. If this is the kind of thing you like, I just think, you know, when people try to play with their hats and their backgrounds on zoo meetings, it's so distracting that you're not paying attention to the actual content. And I'm trying to move around the creature, but she's just doing the sideways moonwalk here or something. So it'll be interesting. I'm going to join. I'll register, you know, for 35 bucks. It'll be fun to see what's going on. Again, I appreciate the attempt to get people together in a somewhat real room, but I don't know if this technology is going to be the best, but it'll be fun to see. So Carl Oquium 2021, you can head over to CarlResearchFellows.org and find a link. I think it is actual. There's a Carl Oquium, CarlOquium2021.com I think is another URL you can use. So speaking of research, a couple of papers that passed over my desk, over my social media feed and Twitter, this one came from PT in England. David Polter, who I follow, shared a review of the movement of the sacroiliac joint review of the anatomy and a systematic review and a discussion of biomechanical consideration. So the SI joint previously thought to be fused and immovable, but chiropractors and PT's would always say, oh no, it moves, it moves, you can adjust and you can cavitate it, but there's still doubt. Does it really move that much? And so they did a review of the anatomy and they did a systematic review of studies looking at this, which found that the minimum movement of nutation and count nutation or counter-nutation was 0.01 degrees and maximum movement was 2.27 degrees. From the results of pelvic incidence change studies with different positions and movements, the highest change was nine degrees and the lowest change was zero degrees. So does it move? Yes, David Polter I think described it as it creaks, maybe it gaps, it kind of, but it's still so tightly held together. And of course the conclusions here, SI joint movement should be studied more intensely as biomechanical perspective to understand its movements. We still don't know for sure, but I don't know that we need to argue about this. And again, go to David Polter's tweet to read his thoughts on this. Can we affect it? I think so. It doesn't matter how much it moves. I don't really know, but interesting review. Also something I found interesting was this self-report versus physical measures of spinal stiffness by Nielsen and other others, including Hartvigson and Greg Kochak. This is a continuation of research that Kochak has done where he's looking at spinal stiffness. He's in his lab, they've developed a device that can measure stiffness of specific joints. And then they're looking at, okay, does that have anything to do with what cavitates, with where the pain is? This is a self-report. So patient, I think is 29 patients who were given questionnaires about their low back pain and about their stiffness. And it turns out that if a patient says, oh man, I'm feeling stiff in the low back, well, when you actually measure the stiffness, it doesn't coordinate. And so these perceptions of stiffness are not equivalent or equal to the actual stiffness of a joint. And I think this is, you know, very specific, but also interesting to consider and to look at. May have some biopsychosocial aspects to consider as well as mechanical and maybe in the future a way to determine who gets adjusted and where. Speaking of Greg Kochak, I did not remember to bring this up, but let's look at my Twitter feed where I shared a tweet at that. Sorry, not Greg Kochak, but Jan Hartfixen, who recently was honored and appointed a knight of the order of Danabrog by Her Majesty Queen Margaret of Denmark. So this well-known and accomplished researcher from Denmark has been knighted. Don't know what that means in Denmark, but that is pretty, pretty cool. And one more research paper to discuss, a text neck. This is one of my pet peeves. I, you know, agree with so many who talk about the nocebel effect of discussing this type of thing. It's so easy for chiropractors to jump on, you know, oh, tech neck, yeah, text neck or tech neck. Stop looking at our phones, stop looking down and texting all the time, you're going to get neck pain. Well, this study coming out of Brazil, I've been seeing more and more papers coming out of Brazil from Correia Ferreira, Fernandez, Hayes, Nogueira and Meziat Filho, did an observational cross-sectional study. So it's observational to investigate the association between text neck and neck pain in adults. 582 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 65 studied a bunch of different variables on them, gave them a self-reported questionnaire and then looked at their standing and sitting flexion range of motion and position. And what did they find? Well, the cervical flexion angle of the standing participant using a smartphone did not associate with a prevalence of neck pain, neck pain frequency or maximum neck pain intensity. Also, the cervical flexion angle of the sitting participant using the smartphone did not associate with neck pain, neck pain frequency or maximum neck pain intensity. In conclusion, text neck was not associated with prevalence of neck pain, neck pain frequency or maximum neck pain intensity in adults. And there have been previous studies, I believe another one from Brazil where they did look at teenagers to see if there was any association. And again, there was not. So I think we need to be very careful as chiropractors to, you know, on our blogs, on our social media, especially with a stay at home orders and homeschooling, we need to be careful about talking about the association between text neck and neck pain. Now, is posture important? Sure, absolutely. Teach people posture, teach people ways to modify their position and to hold their phone up. And this is how I do it. You know, I find myself looking down all the time on my phone and I'll remember and I'll bring it up to eye level. And I'm sure it looks awkward to people, but for other reasons other than pain, I think we can suggest, suggest good posture habits, but we don't need to warn people to say that it's going to cause pain. So let's just stick with the available research, I think, and encourage good posture without creating a nocebo effect. That's it for this week in chiropractic. I didn't want to just point out that world spine care global nonprofit registered in three countries who has clinics around the world providing spine care to those underserved communities is holding a campaign they call the helping hands campaign, which emphasizes that 540 people 540 million people worldwide suffer from low back pain and they're raising funds to support their clinics. Full disclosure, I do work with world spine care as a independent consultant. And so I provide my time for their social media and I am involved with fundraising. And so that's why I'm bringing this up today. The call is to donate $54 or pounds wherever you are to world spine care representing the 540 million people suffering from low back pain. And these funds go towards the world spine care clinics and the mission to provide evidence based sustainable spine care for everyone around the world. And I've been involved with world spine care since I was a student in 2014. And I love the mission. I love their vision. And I really think that it's an organization that any spine care practitioner, whether it is primary spine practitioner, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, anyone who deals with the spine should be involved. And $54 is not much to ask. I contribute every month myself. And so thank you very much for watching this week in chiropractic again, follow exploring chiropractic and all social media at exploring chiro. Send me your thoughts and input feedback on this format of a weekly news show. I'm enjoying it. It does take some time to put together, but I think this could be fun. And I think especially bringing on some guests to talk back and forth and share different opinions about this news would be a great way to do it. So thanks again for joining exploring chiropractic. This was this week in chiropractic for December 21, 2021. I will see you next week.