Bone Density Testing - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
BONE DENSITY TESTING CAN OFFER AN IMPORTANT PIECE OF THE PUZZLE:
I love what bone density testing offers us - in the right hands. however, I am tired of seeing horribly done tests from DXA centers that simply do not know what they are doing. ANY IMAGING CENTER CAN OFFER SCANS WITHOUT ANY TRAINING.
I see DXA reports from all over the country. Three times this week I had to break the news to clients that not only did they not gain bone density, but they had lost bone density - can be the other way too - people think they gain when they have not due to incorrect reporting.
Here is a maddening response from a center when one of my clients requested the diagnostic pages (you can see what the diagnostic pages look like in the back of my book.
"Our imaging center does send the images to a radiologist to be read its something the computer reads and prints out automatically." OUTRAGEOUS! Automatic - many centers do this to save money and even when someone looks at them they have they been trained - including radiologists - it requires special training. It saddens me and angers me to see DXA testing handled so poorly. And, even the imaging centers do not realize how bad this is - I truly believe that they think this practice is just fine because they are not trained to understand nuances.