About the desk, and how we work.

Spine Health Wire is a small, advertising-supported local health publication. It covers one beat: what a car crash does to a spine in the St. Louis metro, why the injury reports in late, and how to get examined this week. It is written like a wire service night desk because that is the register the subject deserves: short, dated, sourced, and unsentimental.

Who pays for this desk

Missouri Injury Clinic does. Stated plainly: this desk is compensated for featuring the clinic, and every page says so. We are not the clinic. We are not a law office. We are not a party to anyone's insurance claim. We publish only the lanes, rooms, hours, and the three reviews the clinic publishes on moinjuryclinic.com. We do not write reviews, rank providers, or give medical or legal advice. If you want a second opinion about where to be examined, get one. This desk will not be offended.

What we cover and what we do not

We cover the pattern: the 72-hour lag, whiplash, low back strain after a rear-end hit, concussion without a knockout, the north county commute crash, the handoff when you are helping someone else, the logistics of the first visit, and what a dated record is. We cover the three rooms with addresses and hours as published. We cover the emergency line on every page because the subject requires it.

We do not cover claims, settlements, or anyone's dispute with an insurer. We do not describe how a visit is billed, because we do not own the clinic and cannot verify it. We do not publish crash statistics we cannot source to a .gov page. We do not invent staff, services, or wait times. If a fact is not on the clinic's site or a federal health page, it is not on this desk.

How a fact gets in

• Clinic facts, meaning rooms, hours, phones, lanes, the named concussion-rehab tools, and the three reviews, come from moinjuryclinic.com as published. Hours are worth confirming on the phone; the clinic can change them and this desk may lag.
• Medical background, meaning what whiplash is, why soft-tissue pain is delayed, what a concussion is, and which symptoms belong in an emergency room, is stated generally and cited to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration where a reader might reasonably doubt it.
• Everything else is editorial: description, emphasis, and a point of view about delay. Those are ours and are labeled as such by the register they are written in.

What the photographs are

The skyline photograph on the 270 page is a real image of downtown St. Louis from Wikimedia Commons, credited in its caption to the photographer under the license stated. The remaining scenes, the interstate at night, the exam room at dawn, the kitchen counter, the headrest, the lightbox, and the desk on the home page, are editorial illustrations generated for this desk to stand in for moments the pattern describes. They are captioned as scenes, not as documentary photographs of any specific crash, room, or patient, and no person appears in them.

Corrections

If a room's hours have changed, a phone number is wrong, a citation does not say what we say it says, or a sentence reads as something it should not, we want to know. Write to the desk through the clinic's contact page at moinjuryclinic.com and say it is for Spine Health Wire. Corrections are made on the page, and the filed date in the dateline is updated when they are.

The one action

Every page on this desk ends the same way, and this one will too. If you were in a crash in the St. Louis metro and the neck, back, or head does not feel right, get examined this week. A documented exam protects your health and your options. Missouri Injury Clinic, run by Joseph L. Hollingsworth, DC, publishes auto injuries as a lane and has three rooms that can see people. The nearest to this desk is Hazelwood. The rooms are here. The first visit is here.

The line above the action

Chest pain, a sudden severe headache, weakness or numbness on one side, trouble speaking, a loss of bowel or bladder control, or a head injury with vomiting or worsening confusion is an emergency room trip right now, not a call to a clinic. An injury clinic is built for planned care. If it sends you to the ER instead of booking you, that is the system working.