Well, this project is meant to be educational, and a learning experience, which therefore means there will be some mistakes and misunderstandings. This post may be short, but this was kind of the focus of today (other than my internship site getting me dairy queen, which was a nice end to my week).
A few blog posts ago, maybe the second to last one, I talked about MAGEC rods and how they related to spinal fusion, however due to a small misunderstanding on my behalf, the surgery those children have who are still in the process of growing is not considered spinal fusion.
In the regular spinal fusion surgery, whether done anteriorly or posteriorly the spine is legitimately fused together, however, and this should make sense by using any sort of common sense children who are still growing should not have their spine fused, as it could lead to issues with their height and health, and back pain, and so on.
This to me really just shows one thing, that I'm going to struggle more than I thought I would with collecting data. I can try to data mine, or possibly ask for some data points from Dr. Shindell himself, or even use data collected through other studies, to put together a well rounded set of data to answer my question, but I still fear a significant lack in this data.
From the beginning of the project, I knew the amount of data would be my number one problem with this project (that, as well as my emotional connection to the project, which I will explain in another post), but at the end of the day, this is a great learning and personal experience that I'm very grateful for, and I will try my best to try and collect enough data to have some sort of analysis. Some people say 6 is a minimum, while others say 10, which is what I'm hoping for. I'll keep everyone updated with how the data collection is going throughout my other blog posts during this project.
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