[mmglobal]

Greetings from Straubing!

I just had a wonderful conversation with discyphor. I was correct in that he's too close to the industry and medical practices to be able to 'come out'. I believe that he posted with the best of intentions and I'm happy to be able to let all the information stand. I invited him to post and participate if he'd like, but in order to do so, he's going to have to say who he works for and what he does. If he can't do that... he'll send me info that he thinks will be useful to the community and I'll post it for him.

We spoke for a long while about FAD and he answered all my questions about potential issues. Two of the principal users/developers of these techniques are doctors that I know well and have the greatest respect for.... Richard Derby is largely thought of as the father of discography. Kevin Pauza is on the forefront of intradiscal therapies that will hopefully be the future of treatments for those of us who catch the problems before they turn into huge structural problems. (I would have been perfect... when I was first disabled by 2-level discogenic pain, I still have very tall discs that looked pretty good on MRI in spite of some minor bulging.)

IMHO, FAD will not be the definitive test that we wish we could have, but it certainly looks like it has the potential to add more useful information to the mix. I'll bet that we'll still get ambiguous results at times, but hopefully, this additional data will allow us to have more information, possibly taking some tests from ambiguous to more determinative.

One interesting note is that FAD started as an adjunct to provocative discography and many users still do it this way. However, as some practitioners get more comfortable with FAD, they are frequently using it INSTEAD of provocative discography. Won't that be nice to not be tortured by testing over and over... "Yes, that's a 10/10, but is it your pain? And please stop screaming, you are scaring the other victims in the waiting room!"

I've changed the posters username to something other than the trademarked test name. I thank discyphor for the info and for taking the time to talk to me today and look forward to more info from him/her/it/them.

All the best,

Mark