I sent a letter to the International Journal of Spine Surgery in March 2023 regarding the dumbest article that could have ever been published in any field. I used ChatGPT to express myself in a diplomatic tone because I kept calling them retards in my original draft.
Please read the published paper and see for yourself,
https://www.ijssurgery.com/content/ijss/early/2022/10/27/8382.full.pdf
My letter to the journal:
To the editors of the International Journal of Spine Surgery,
I would like to draw your attention to an article published in your journal titled “Assessment of Cervical and Lumbar Kinematics in Simulated Open and Closed Kinetic Chain.”
Unfortunately, I do not expect your reviewers to have identified the misunderstanding of the kinematic chain concept, nor the subsequent misidentification of kinematic chains. The entire health sciences field has failed to recognize this issue.
However, I would like to focus on a glaring mistake that can be identified with the least bit of common sense, without understanding Franz Reuleaux’s work or DOF in an articulated system.
In the paper, the authors anchored the skulls and pelvises of cadavers in two slightly different variations that restricted translation between the anchored points but allowed for anterior/posterior rotation of the pelvis around its anchor point.
I will not go into how they named one variation a simulation of one thing and the other variation a simulation of another, neither of which (the simulations and the things they purport to simulate) is accurate. That would require knowledge of kinematics, which I promised not to delve into.
So, is there any human activity that restricts the translation of the skull relative to the pelvis? If such an activity exists, then we can consider the simulations presented by the authors to have value. If not, those simulations are scientifically misleading and useless.
I argue that the latter is the case since none of the examples of activities provided in the article restrict the translation of the head relative to the pelvis. Therefore, the stresses measured in the spine during the simulations are created by the stretching of the spine due to the inability of the anchored points to translate towards each other as they would naturally when tilting of the pelvis occurs in actual human activities.
Sincerely, Fanourios Diplaros
One year later and I haven’t received any reply, nor has the article been retracted.
FD
logifit.gr
Apr. 2024