What's the deal with scoliosis?
My seventh-grader flunked her scoliosis screening for being lopsided, so we hauled her off to the doc to find out if back braces and service dogs are in her future. Nope, all is well.
I'm mystified about this, though I have too much on my plate to do the legwork to get answers to my questions. So I'll just ask them. Of the many, many maladies and infirmities a screening could catch, why is in-school screening for scoliosis the one that's an integral part of the system? How many cases are actually caught? How many false positives (it's not really that simple; it was just a referral for further assessment) are there, and how many actual cases missed? How much does this all cost?
I did do enough research to learn about an interesting young woman with scoliosis somewhere in 650-land (the Peninsula just south of San Francisco) who has created a brochure on looking cool while wearing a back brace, "Fashion Rescue." Moira Lyon also seems to do informal counseling. I hope she's getting grants, awards, lots of boosts on college applications, etc.
— Caroline
I'm mystified about this, though I have too much on my plate to do the legwork to get answers to my questions. So I'll just ask them. Of the many, many maladies and infirmities a screening could catch, why is in-school screening for scoliosis the one that's an integral part of the system? How many cases are actually caught? How many false positives (it's not really that simple; it was just a referral for further assessment) are there, and how many actual cases missed? How much does this all cost?
I did do enough research to learn about an interesting young woman with scoliosis somewhere in 650-land (the Peninsula just south of San Francisco) who has created a brochure on looking cool while wearing a back brace, "Fashion Rescue." Moira Lyon also seems to do informal counseling. I hope she's getting grants, awards, lots of boosts on college applications, etc.
— Caroline
2 Comments:
I don't know how this screening came about, but I do know why: Idiopathic scoliosis occurs in between 1% & 3% of adolescents, mostly females. is often undetected, and often requires treatment to prevent progression and disability.
Early detection and subsequent monitoring will of course 'detect' many people who need no treatment or are in fact 'normal'. This is because the line between normal and abnormal has a big overlap and most screening tests are devised to include some normals as the penalty for catching all the true abnormals.
I came across this site and found it useful for Scoliosis info:
http://www.csmc.edu/5701.html
Hope this helps some readers! =)
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