Femoral Neck Stress Fracture

[KnottedYet]

I'm a 4th year med student and I shadowed in a sports medicine clinic for 2 years. I don't know a lot but I did see this.

It's amazing; the longer I practice, the less I know.

One valuable thing I've learned over the years: a patient will present with one problem, but most of the time that one problem has more than one cause. Patients with only one issue don't come in, their body copes so they don't seek medical help. When the body starts juggling multiple issues, it begins to drop things, and that's when problems show up.

I cringe when I think of the patients I misled and the issues I missed. And in all honesty, I'm probably still misleading and missing. That's why it's called "practice."

[ruffianxc]

Yeah I understand you could get celiac screening, I've just never seen people get screening tests for a stress fracture. I would imagine if you noticed nonunion or repetitive fracturing it would be a good idea. All of my experience with stress fractures are pediatric/ college age kids who are generally healthy can have no other complaints so we never really have high suspicion of these things. I guess I'd think you'd be getting a lot of blood work and in addition to the cost of the test if you tested all stress fractures you'd have to deal with the cost of false positives or further work up. Additionally if you got celiac would you have to get all the other possible things that could be causing osteopenia.

I am doing metabolic bone research this year, taking the entire year off in the lab, and after reading so much about bone disease I just would wonder if you did decide to look into celiac disease, as you thought you had high enough suspicion of it, wouldn't you be obligated to look into at least some other common ones. That would be a lot to do on every stress fracture.

Interesting though.


Yeah practice is interesting. I guess you can only do the best you can do with what you got: the knowledge and judgement you had at that moment.

I agree with what your saying about complex problems and sometimes people come in saying they are worried about x and really they are worried about something else entirely but they didn't want to say it.

As of now I want to go into sports medicine so these questions I find interesting.