Just Keep Waiting…- Zane T.

Hey there. So repetition of events: we ordered our beginning foam and fabric, the engineering peeps made 3-d models (read in fancy slurred Animation Show voice), and us bio med peeps have continued to research….and we are all waiting for our materials to arrive from the distant abyss. But on the research side (which never ceases both in duration and in proving to me that, yes, spines can be indescribably complicated and disturbing) I finally read through one of our sources. And by read through, I mean read it, looked up words I didn’t know, and tried to actually comprehend the chiropractic mumbo-jumbo they flung all over the place. (That does not mean I didn’t read it before, I simply didn’t read all of it. I used what I needed, and left the rest behind.)

So spines. Apparently there is a lot of controversy about subluxation, whether it exists, what it is defined as, what it does, if it’s bad, etc. within the chiropractic community. So much so, that when we read articles, it’s sometimes hard to tell if they’re saying something real, or just trying to make someone else look bad. In the paper I finally read, at one point he talked about someone else’s statement, then referenced another persons’ research, and then asked why the first person didn’t change. I really don’t see why he had to mention that in his article about the definition of subluxation. My bio med peep read articles that had contradictions, too. It makes research a bit odd, but the angles we need seem to be consistent.

I also learned a couple new words from this article(tilde). An AP view of the spine is when the subject is lying down and the x-ray tube (yes it is called a tube, at least on the website I looked at) is 40 inches above them. A PA view is when the subject stands facing away from the x-ray tube, and the tube is 72 inches away. (Thank you Google for taking me to:  https://www.med-ed.virginia.edu/courses/rad/cxr/technique3chest.html). While I was reading, this made absolutely no sense, and I was far more confused than I needed to be. Once I looked it up, I had some perspective on the parts they were referencing, and could picture the angles they were talking about. And angles. I kinda understand how they measure curves. They draw a line from a certain point on the vertebrae, then measure the angle at the intersection. (It’s in the picture.)

So us biomedical peeps are gathering info, our engineering peeps are doing OSHA (which I really need to do one of these days…), and we are all just waiting……..and waiting….for our materials, and the chance to stop researching and staring at pictures like this.