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Friday, October 03, 2003A Miami physician, Marco Vitiello, has come up with a device he said will be able to prove whether people are telling the truth about neck, back and carpal tunnel injuries. If -- and it's a huge if -- the device, called the Comprehensive Neuro-Muscular Profiler (CNMP), could prove to be all he claims, it could make a big difference in many ``soft-tissue'' personal liability and workers' compensation cases in which doctors have a hard time determining the extent of an injury. ``This is a very, very elusive type thing, and anything that can put objective detail to it is valuable,'' said Ron Bellows, a risk management specialist with AIG Consultants. Bellows said there are several devices trying to make such objective measurements, and he's not endorsing any single product, but ``it's become more and more into vogue.... . . The question is can they persuade the medical community by... . . doing trials and showing results.'' The technology, Vitiello acknowledges, is not new, but ``the problem has always been that reading their results has been subjective, varying from doctor to doctor. But with our software, we've solved those dilemmas. We're absolutely objective.'' The device consists of sensors that are applied to the body parts in question, such as the neck, arm, and hand for carpal tunnel syndrome. The sensors then pick up the electrical signal that travels from the brain to the hand along the nerve that runs down the arm. If someone is faking an injury, presumably there’s no nerve signal because there’s no intent to move the limb. It’s not at all clear if this actually works. It may be fairly effective for sorting out false claims of weakness, but what about people whose functional limitations are caused by pain? The pain may cause them to stop trying to move the affected limb, resulting in no nerve activity. That means they would get the same reading as a malingerer. The technology just isn’t there yet to measure pain objectively. However, in the future, functional brain imaging, as detailed in The New Brain, may be used for just this sort of thing. Pain centers in the brain would light up on a functional MRI or PET scan when a person tries to move an injured limb. They wouldn’t light up in a malingerer. Unfortunately, this, too, lies in the future since researchers haven't come to any clear agreement on which functional signals are real and which are "noise." UPDATE: A pain physician who has had some experience with these devices emails: As a pain physicain I have seen a lot of gadgets like that. They all claim to show if someone is actually injured. All seem to be variations of the same type of technology. None has ever been documented to actually be useful. Interestingly they tend to be used by physicians who treat MVAs and by chiropracters. The report is used tp "prove" the injury, not to disprove the reported injury. posted by Sydney on 10/03/2003 08:47:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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