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Less Pain, Better Outcome?
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Researchers have found that one quick way to predict the outcome of spinal surgery is simply to determine how satisfied the patient is afterwards. Not surprisingly, a patient’s satisfaction tends to be based on how much improvement he or she saw. Level of pain also plays a role. Interestingly, …
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Sabre Rattling Or The End Of The World?
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The threat that the Social Security disability trust fund would run out of money in 2016 is not news. People have been talking about this for a long while. But, there is apparently some urgency about the problem at long last. The trustees who oversee the disability trust fund issued a report l…
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New Webpage Coming And A Few Thoughts on Dex Media
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You may have noticed that my old webpage has vanished. We can thank the geniuses at Dex Media for that. My contract for hosting the webpage expired in May, 2015. No one at Dex thought that was worthy of mention. So, away went the website. Dex tried to get me to sign a new contract.…
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A Few Bad Apples
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There is an unfortunate tendency of people in any industry to close ranks and deny there is anything wrong. No matter how awful it might look from the outside, the people making their living off of some endeavour are always going to defend it. I guess the fear is that admitting there are proble…
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A New Way To Deal With Back Pain?
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A company called dorsaVi produces a device called a ViMove that attaches to your spine and records your movements. The idea is to help a patient identify which positions or activities are causing him or her back pain. Using this data, as a form of bio-feedback, a back pain suffer can change his …
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Free Medical Records For People Applying For Disability
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I note that Oregon is contemplating passing a law that would allow those persons applying for Social Security disability to get copies of their medical records for free. This is an excellent idea. Several other states already have such a law. The benefit of laws like these is that it ensures tha…
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If It’s Good Enough For Europe . . .
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The most common way surgeons in America deal with bad discs in the lumbar spine is fusion. This procedure is pretty much what it sounds like: a doctor will force the spine into one, contiguous piece and two or more levels. Doctors have been doing this for a long time. Some people get good relief….
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Is The Sky Falling? Is There A Way To Tell?
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Almost everything you read or hear about the health of Social Security is unreliable. This is for one simple reason: politics. Commentators from the right and the left often are describing two different scenarios entirely. For those people who simply do not believe in the social safety net, the e…
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Opioid Treatment Without Addiction?
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It is well settled that such opioids as morphine can be very effective in the treatment of chronic pain. The trouble comes with another prominent feature of this class of drugs: the likelihood of addiction. This has led to a long search for an opioid that does not addict those persons taking it….
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Obama Proposes Eliminating Social Security Loophole
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Apparently, Social Security has taken notice of people using their current rules to maximize their retirement benefits. This can occur for two-income couples wherein one will claim spousal benefits while the other waits until age 70 to collect. NPR’s Planet Money did a story about this. It is w…
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Combine Funding For Disability And Retirement?
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Republicans, as we know, are determined to use any means possible to cut funding for Social Security disability. One current method is to create a phony crisis and then rush into with a Draconian solution. The phony crisis, in this case, is a pending shortfall in the money available to pay Socia…
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What’s Topical In Low Back Pain Research
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Dr. Cho of the Mt Sinai Medical Center in New York looked at over 16,500 medical studies on low back pain. He was trying to determine which ones are cited most often. From the original group, Dr. Cho found 322 papers that had been cited at least 100 times. From this, Dr. Cho tried to…
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Another Bad Idea
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If dumb ideas were currency, the folks at Forbes would be even richer than they pretend to be. In an apparent effort to demonstrate that stupidity is eternal, here comes another great insight: Let’s privatize Social Security disability. Yeah, sure. Good thinking. Some guy named Merrill Matthews, …
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Walk Like A Man?
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Is back pain not enough? Now you have to endure comparisons to primates? Apparently so. A new study shows that people with back pain are likely to have spines that resembles those of Chimpanzees. Indeed, the spines of back pain sufferers look morelike Chimps than humans. The theory here is that …
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The “Doc Fix” And What It Portends
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It was a moment that might have seen Captain Renault striding out of the Capital Building saying. “I am shocked, shocked to discover legislating going on here,” Somehow, Democrats and Republicans came together to pass a permanent solution to the the problem of Medicare reimbursement for physician… Continue Reading
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Bits and Bytes and Bad Backs
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I suppose it will come as no surprise to discover that technology has increased back and neck pain. All you need do to confirm this is look out the window. Just about everybody is holding some device in his or her head and staring down at it. This is notably true of those people under…
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ALJ’s Lose Lawsuit Over Quotas
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The union representing the Administrative Law Judges (ALJ’s) who hear Social Security disability cases sued the Social Security Administration. The ALJ’s argued that SSA’s requirement that the judges issue a set number of decisions per year violated the Administrative Procedures Act. Though their…
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Back Hurt? Better Get Moving
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The natural reaction for someone suffering from back pain is to move as little as possible. There is a certain logic in this idea. After all, if moving around makes the pain worse, laying down or sitting still must be the best course. But, it turns out that the smartest thing you can do is…
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SSA Proposes Mandatory Reporting of Workers’ Compensation Benefits
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In their budget proposal for 2016, SSA has requested new legislation. They would like to make it mandatory for any organization paying workers’ compensation benefits to report that fact to them. SSA does take workers’ comp benefits into account when calculating benefit amounts. They use a syste…
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More Evidence That Less Is More
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The trend in medical research lately has been towards less treatment. This seems to be borne out again in a new study from the University of Pittsburgh. Scientists at Pitt examined the outcomes of older patients with spinal stenosis who opted for physical therapy rather than back surgery. The r…
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Social Security Changes Evidence Rules For Hearings
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The Social Security Administration just altered the way in which claimants, and their lawyers, must submit evidence in their cases. Until now, the SSA regulations were, at best, unclear, as to whether a claimant had to submit evidence that did not tend to show she was disabled. This was a point…
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Another Good Reason To Not Take Tylenol
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It’s not bad enough that Acetaminophen (most commonly sold as Tylenol) can kill you, or at least your liver, with even the smallest overdose. It turns out, the stuff does not even work on back pain and the most common form of arthritis, osteoarthritis. Given the rather extraordinary risks involve…
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Judge Sues Social Security For Discrimination
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Here is a story that caught my attention. A Social Security Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) in Portland, Maine has sued the agency. Judge Katherine Morgan, age 71, claims that SSA has subjected her to unfounded criticism due to her age and sex. That is is interesting enough. But the devil, as the…
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Over 65 With Back Pain? Skip the X-Rays For Now Says New Study
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Researchers at the University of Washington, in Seattle, are out with a new study regarding when to send older patients for x-rays and other scans. Traditionally, doctors were more likely to have their elderly patients undergo radiographic testing sooner than their younger patients. The thinking …
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On Schizophrenia, Marijuana and Disability
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Those persons who are claiming disability due to mental illnesses have the additional burden of showing that their mental impairments are not due to the use of such illegal substances as marijuana. The burden of proof is on the claimant to show the drug use is not “material.” Drug use is not mat…
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