A young female athlete girl breaks her leg playing soccer. After treating the fracture the doctor sees the potential of a more serious condition and calls her back. While he is doing the tests she begins to study the diagnosis, treatment and outcome of the treatment and in doing so she encounters something disturbing. Are all the surgeries being done for this condition necessary?
After they left she pulled up www.alltheweb.com and started searching with the words “broken bone”. She looked at the first three of the nearly 98,000 hits. There was nothing interesting there. She added leg and the number of hits fell to just over 22,000. She added femur and trauma, the number was still over 2136, entirely too many to look at. Finally she dropped the word femur and added the word radiology and the number of hits was 487. She wrote down the key words in each group, there was no reason to repeat unproductive searches. She had to get a better search argument.
She picked up her crutches and headed to the bathroom. As she was sitting on the commode she thought of several other words. She went back to the computer and one by one she added, teen, female and pain. There were just over 150 hits! What a dramatic change! She started looking at the hits. The first one was about a bone disease called osteomylitis. She looked at it and shuddered. It was an infection in the bone that weakens the bone making it likely to breakage. It usually only followed an injury or surgery where the bone was exposed to allow a path for the infection. The second was about something called myeloma, a disease that destroyed the bone and made it weak, allowing it to fracture. There was osteoporosis which showed as more likely for an older person and rarely seen in a healthy teen. There was one called osteoid osteoma. It produced a benign growth in the bone that weakened it, there was pain and often the diagnosis was because of the pain or a break at the weakened spot. They were most likely between the age of twelve and twenty nine. But all had one contradicting feature. They were diagnosable by x-ray. In fact x-ray was the test that usually detected them. The hospital had x-rayed her leg. The doctor mentioned nothing but the break. Her broken leg was a fluke. She must get on with her schoolwork, allow her leg to heal and be ready for the basketball season in her Senior year. Although basket ball was her second sport, maybe she could get a scholarship.
About a half hour later her mom came in and asked if she wanted something. She plugged in a wireless intercom they had used between the basement and the kitchen. “Let’s put this here for a couple of weeks, till you get better. If you need something, you can call me.”
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