Football, soccer, and cross-country keep families busy in the fall. Here is what the research says about the injuries that show up most often and how to lower the risk.

An editorial in a research collection on whiplash-associated disorder (WAD) notes that this "acceleration-deceleration mechanism" is the most common injury sustained in motor vehicle crashes, and occurs in the Western world at a rate of roughly 300 per 100,000 people every year

A narrative review published in Clinics in Orthopedic Surgery puts a number on something most people never think to ask about: leg length discrepancy (LLD) has a prevalence of roughly 90% in the general population, and about 40% among athletes specifically. In other words, walking around with legs that aren't perfectly identical in length is closer to "the default human condition" than "a rare anomaly."

You know the move. You stand up from your desk, twist your torso like you're wringing out a towel, and POP! A small chorus of relief ripples up your spine. For one glorious second, you feel like a marionette whose strings just got adjusted by a very competent puppeteer. Then a coworker looks at you like you just committed a small crime.

Is that satisfying crack secretly wrecking your spine? Let's find out, with actual research instead of vibes.

Somewhere between "eat your vegetables" and "don't forget your library book," most parents also end up asking: is this the kind of thing a chiropractor should look at? Little spines go through a lot — tumbles off bikes, backpacks stuffed like Thanksgiving suitcases, hours hunched over tablets. It's a fair question. It just doesn't have a simple, one-size-fits-all answer, and that's worth being upfront about.

Your spine doesn't have a check-engine light. No little icon pops up on your forehead when a disc is unhappy or a joint is stiff. Instead, it sends much subtler memos. Most of us are excellent at ignoring memos. Here are five signals worth actually reading, based on guidance from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.

Every August, backpacks across the country quietly transform from "school bag" into "small piece of checked luggage." Textbooks, a laptop, a water bottle the size of a fire extinguisher, an emergency hoodie, three loose pencils rolling around at the bottom — it adds up fast. And it adds up on a spine that's still under construction.

Gardening has a reputation as a gentle, meditative hobby. Your lumbar spine would like to file a formal complaint about that reputation.

Here's the good news: a few minutes of stretching before and after yard work is backed by real research, not just something your chiropractor says to sound thorough.

Stress doesn't politely stay in your head where it belongs. Stress often travels down the neck, along the shoulders, into the low back. The research on exactly how it does that is more specific than you'd expect.

If you walk in with ordinary low back pain and no alarming symptoms, current guidelines are blunt about it: skip the X-ray.

Somewhere between "cracking your knuckles causes arthritis" and "you swallow eight spiders a year in your sleep," there lives a myth so sticky it deserves its own adjustment: once you start seeing a chiropractor, your spine becomes hopelessly dependent, and you're doomed to a lifetime of appointments.

Let's take this myth to the mat (a padded chiropractic table, specifically) and see what actually holds up.

Air travel is a uniquely effective mechanism for producing back pain. Prolonged sitting, fixed posture, low cabin humidity, reduced circulation, and the physiological effects of pressurized cabins combine to create conditions your lumbar spine would not have chosen for itself. The research on all of this is both illuminating and slightly alarming. Let's go through it.

Every July, roughly 135,000 people descend on the San Diego Convention Center for Comic-Con International. They come for panels, exclusives, celebrity sightings, and the singular experience of waiting in a line for four hours to get into a room to wait in another line. It is, by every objective measure, a marvel of human enthusiasm. It is also, from a musculoskeletal standpoint, a four-day endurance event that most attendees are spectacularly unprepared for.

San Diego is supposed to be sunny. So why does your knee ache every June? It's not a conspiracy — it's meteorology, and the science is more interesting than you'd expect.

San Diego's cycling scene is spectacular — and spectacularly good at producing neck, back, and knee pain. Here's what the research says about why, and what to do about it.

Welcome to the weekend warrior lifestyle. It is more common than you think, more scientifically validated than you might expect, and more likely to result in a shoulder strain than either of those facts would suggest.

Evidence-based strategies for keeping your joints happy across every mile from Torrey Pines to Mission Trails — and yes, the research is more interesting than it sounds.

This article explains the science, the risks, and — most importantly — what you should be doing in those first groggy minutes after waking up, before your fully hydrated and therefore gloriously pressurized spine meets the demands of the day.

This article, meticulously researched, moderately alarmed, and occasionally amused explores what the peer-reviewed science tells us about the physical toll of competitive gaming, why the gaming chair is not the ergonomic savior it was marketed to be, and what chiropractors and allied health professionals can do to help a generation of athletes who never leave their desks.

This article explores what the science actually tells us about what happens to the human body during spaceflight, the extraordinary exercise regimens astronauts use to fight back, and what greets them and their thoroughly confused bodies upon return to Earth.