Hi Celia...
If someone has structural scoliosis, I believe the vertebrae are wedge shaped, no matter what the degree.
I don't know your daughter's Risser score, but at worse, she only has a 25% chance of her curve ever progressing:
http://www.vh.org/pediatric/provider...abilities.html
I know it's a difficult decision, but if you think of it from the perspective of what's good for all of us, I think you'll see that we shouldn't be doing anything with kids with very small curves. For example, if we treat everyone with a curve less than 20 degrees, we'll be putting around 75% of them in a brace or cast for no good reason. That's actually a huge number of kids. While that may not be terrible for the individual child, think what the cost is to society. What would it cost to put 100,000 kids a year into braces, when 75% of them wouldn't need the brace? Do we want to live somewhere where the cost of insurance (or the tax rate for countries with socialized medicine), is huge? If not, where should we draw the line? Do we treat kids with 20 degree curves, but not with 19 degree curves? And, what about other diseases? As you can image, it would get prohibitively expensive.
If, on the other hand, one wants to pay for a brace out of their own pocket, than the only dilemma is that their child probably will be wearing an uncomfortable brace for many years for possibly no good reason.
Regards,
Linda
If someone has structural scoliosis, I believe the vertebrae are wedge shaped, no matter what the degree.
I don't know your daughter's Risser score, but at worse, she only has a 25% chance of her curve ever progressing:
http://www.vh.org/pediatric/provider...abilities.html
I know it's a difficult decision, but if you think of it from the perspective of what's good for all of us, I think you'll see that we shouldn't be doing anything with kids with very small curves. For example, if we treat everyone with a curve less than 20 degrees, we'll be putting around 75% of them in a brace or cast for no good reason. That's actually a huge number of kids. While that may not be terrible for the individual child, think what the cost is to society. What would it cost to put 100,000 kids a year into braces, when 75% of them wouldn't need the brace? Do we want to live somewhere where the cost of insurance (or the tax rate for countries with socialized medicine), is huge? If not, where should we draw the line? Do we treat kids with 20 degree curves, but not with 19 degree curves? And, what about other diseases? As you can image, it would get prohibitively expensive.
If, on the other hand, one wants to pay for a brace out of their own pocket, than the only dilemma is that their child probably will be wearing an uncomfortable brace for many years for possibly no good reason.
Regards,
Linda
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