Slavishly following long-held guidelines for diagnosing the cause of arthritis-related back pain is resulting in excessive tests, delays in pain relief and wasteful spending of as much as $10,000 per patient, new Johns Hopkins-led research suggests. Arthritis is a common cause of back pain, though difficult to precisely diagnose, experts say, because of the poor correlation between a finding of arthritis on an X-ray or MRI and the degree of a patient's back pain...

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