We are continuing to receive favorable responses referable to our recent meeting in Las Vegas, Advanced Diagnosis and Treatment for Neck and Back Pain, which was held
December 13-16, 2006, at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.

We had several hundred attendees and the critique forms were reviewed and again quite favorable. We were once again honored to have a distinguished and highly qualified group of health care professionals representing the American Back Society to an unsurpassed
level of excellence.

It was very difficult to pick out a best score or a special honorary group based upon the scores, however, we would like to briefly acknowledge those faculty that scored 4.5 or
greater. This group includes Michael Kuchera, D.O., Jay Sandweiss, D.O., Diane Lee, P.T., Jacob Rosenberg, M.D., Ronald Donelson, M.D., Donald Murphy, D.C., Craig Morris, D.C., Ken Hsu, Christopher Showalter, Bjorn Eek, M.D., Carol McFarland, P.T., Bob Gant, Ph.D. The remainder of the faculty also did extremely well and the majority ranged from 4 to 4.5.

The overall response was extremely good, and our attendees appear to once again be well satisfied with the materials presented, the levels of presentation, the audiovisual services, and the convention center facilities at the Riviera.

The Riviera Hotel has one of the very best convention centers in Las Vegas. They are continually booked all year round with conventions of all different types, and their primary forte is the convention and meeting business.

We are currently in the planning stages of our next meeting for June 18-21, 2008 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is an excellent venue for meetings, in terms of ease and convenience of travel, offering a wide variety of entertainment activities to complete your entertainment and thereby having available for you a complete package of education, entertainment and recreation.

We once again will focus on bringing our attendees up to date and current in diagnosis and treatment of both acute and chronic conditions of the spine, cervical, thoracic, and lumbar. We have been increasingly focusing our educational programs on providing evidence-based material and this is the current standard throughout the country. Evidence-based decisionmaking is becoming extremely important and the payors are requiring that of us. There are several research-based clinical guidelines available and the payors expect us to use these guidelines in our decision making.

We will continue to bring you a well-rounded program to help our attendees improve their knowledge and skills, and again directing our efforts to a diverse group of health care professionals, crossing many professional lines of disciplines and specialization.