Spinal Kinetics is a medical ligament injury testing company that’s nationwide. And its whole purpose is to assist with the accurate diagnosis of spinal ligament injuries. Spinal ligament injuries leave excessive motion factors behind on stress X-rays. Spinal Kinetics is a medical testing company whose board-certified medical radiologists accurately measure the excessive motion. They have their own system and they’ve trademarked their own procedure term called computerized radiographic mensuration analysis (CRMA®). I’m going to tell you why you should use them with my own story.

My name is Dr. Cronk. I’m the COO (chief operating officer) of Spinal Kinetics. Some people may say I’m biased, so I want to tell you how I became the COO of Spinal Kinetics. Back as a treating provider around 1995, I learned what excessive motion testing did. And I also learned the AMA guides and the spinal injury model and how much emphasis the impairment guides actually put on excessive motion problems with the spine. As a treating chiropractor, this made sense to me. And what the tests did for me is it allowed me, for the first time in my private practice, to be able to determine the severity and the location of the patient’s injuries right away. Week one within their care I knew what was going on and how bad and how severe their injuries were.

I also knew that I as a Doctor of Chiropractic could’ve done my own testing. I could’ve done my own analysis. The problem that I had was in the injury market, these injury findings were so significant that I wanted the leverage of having the results be unbiased. Somebody could look at me as a provider and say that I’m biased. I’m trying to manipulate results of testing. Doctors are quite often attacked for trying to over-diagnose something or over evaluate something or trying to make it look a lot worse or appear a lot worse than it is in order for them to enrich themselves. I understood in the injury market; this was a very real phenomenon. But I also understood that the findings themselves were significant. These findings were causing a significant impairment to occur in the impairment guides. These findings were also findings that were used to pre-authorize surgical fusion surgeries at the time. I knew the results were significant.

And I also knew as a treating provider that I was treating a very serious condition. The whole world said this was an extremely serious condition. And I was taking patients on a regular basis and taking them three, four, five, six months out with care and being able to get them fantastic results.

• No chronic pain.
• No activities of daily living problems.
• No duties under duress problems.
• No loss of enjoyment or life factors.
• No disability whatsoever.

So I wanted to, as a provider, show everyone that I was treating what the medical science of the day says are serious injuries. I wanted to show that I, and myself as part of a profession called chiropractic, was able to treat these and handle these. And I knew it would not be looked upon correctly if I was coming up with the results myself. That’s why I used an unbiased third party. At that time in the market it was called Spinal Logic Diagnostics.

So I sent out for excessive motion testing on every single one of my patients that I thought had a spinal ligament injury when they were in an injury scenario. And so that’s why today I believe the findings of excessive motion testing on stress radiology are so significant. They’re so important that they should be done in an unbiased manner. As a matter of fact, my experience and my opinion say that insurance providers should not even accept the results unless they’re done independent because who can tell the provider that’s actually trying to manipulate the results and the provider that’s not trying to manipulate the results? The only way you can guard against that as an insurer is if it’s done by an unbiased third party. And doctors are not good enough. I have seen doctors in the market … I have talked to services in the market personally where they’re actually using a non-doctor or a non-licensed professional to do these services. You absolutely cannot do that.

The process should be independent. Spinal Kinetics has a process called computerized radiographic mensuration analysis (CRMA®). There are many, many doctors and service providers that are saying that they do CRMA® or that they do these computerized radiographic mensuration procedures. You can’t google, unless you use Google, you don’t use Safari and google. You use Google. You can’t get a CRMA unless you’re doing it through Spinal Kinetics.

What makes Spinal Kinetics unique?

This company was founded by Dr. Steven Brownstein. Steven Brownstein is a board-certified medical radiologist. And he was also one of the first radiologists that really understood excessive motion testing. And he also understood stress MRIs because he had also developed and had centers with upright weight-bearing MRI. He was trying to press into the environment the significance of stress testing. And that’s why I went with and joined hands with Dr. Brownstein. He’s a pioneer in the area of stress testing and stress radiology. One of the things that we developed together is a process. We use board certified medical radiologists. All of our studies go through two licensed professionals that are trained to actually accurately do these studies. If we have ratable findings in the company, they are often reviewed by a third licensed professional. We are the only company in the country that does that.

You can have a group buy some sort of a software or do some sort of a service and most of the time the providers are not familiar with the software, they are not familiar with the testing, or they have little experience with it at all. I don’t know of a company in the country that has more experience with this testing than we do. Nobody else in the market is doing this type of testing with this type of review with medical providers themselves. If you can find an independent service that has as much experience as Spinal Kinetics and does a better job than Spinal Kinetics, I’m going to be the first one to tell you to use it. The only thing I’ve ever been after with my career is accurate testing. You want accurate testing. You want the testing to be unbiased.

You as a provider want to focus on what you do best, which is treatment. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of how images are acquired, how studies are accurate or how they’re found to be inaccurate. You don’t need to know any of that. You don’t want to know any of that. And you don’t want to have any experience with it. And you also don’t want to rely on those that don’t have experience with it. You want to rely on those that do. And that’s Spinal Kinetics.

Spinal Kinetics has quality control second to none. As a company, Spinal Kinetics is changing the way these injuries are worked up so that conservative care providers that understand these injuries can get on the injury right away. Time matters in these injuries. Accurate diagnosis matters. The sooner and the quicker the patient get an accurate diagnosis … I’m talking about within week one, within days if possible, they should get an accurate diagnosis so that good providers who know what they’re doing with the treatment of spinal ligament injuries can get to treating the patient, so the patient reduces their risk.

Remember with spinal ligament injuries today, 50 percent of the people who have them are never going to fully recover. And 30 percent of that 50 percent are going to have debilitating conditions as a result of their injury. We don’t need more injury doctors. We need better injury doctors. And that’s what Spinal Kinetics is trying to assist, the best providers in the market in understanding exactly what that patient’s injuries are. Remember, there’s over 220 specialized ligaments in the human spine. There’s 23 discs. MRI is good for those 23 discs. CRMA is good for all of the ligaments. And those providers that understand that are some of the best providers in the market. Those are the providers that we want to work with.

For more information on Spinal Ligament Injuries please check us out at http://www.smartinjurydoctor.comor check out our SmartInjuryDoctors® Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher.

For information on spinal ligament testing by board certified medical radiologists go to www.thespinalkinetics.com