Page 15 - DMX HANDBOOK 4TH EDITION
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12. DMX can detect ligamentous laxity that static X-rays cannot see.
Because DMX can X-ray the vertebrae in motion, it is able to detect ligamentous laxity that static X-rays cannot see. As noted by
Foreman/Croft, static X-rays don’t reveal major ligamentous injuries:
Most of these [static X-ray] studies…fail to define movement in a
dynamic sense…deviation from the normal biokinetics may occur
somewhere between these arcs of motion, which would not be
visualized by static radiographic techniques.
A study by Buonocore found that 68% of the whiplash injuries studied by DMX were interpreted as abnormal. Another study by
Woesner and Mitts reported that DMX detected abnormalities in 35% of the plain film studies that were interpreted as normal.
The author’s series has shown that objectively determined ligamentous laxity has been revealed by DMX in nearly 90% of the cases
of patients with chronic pain resistant to treatment and lasting more than one year post-surgery. Nearly 30% of these were revealed
to have ligamentous laxity sufficient to warrant a 25% impairment rating using the standards of the AMA Guides, 5th Ed.
90% of subjects with chronic neck pain resistant to conventional
treatment had abnormal ligamentous laxity on DMX. 30% had
enough laxity to justify a 25-28% AMA impairment.
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