About
About this site
Who writes it, how the numbers get on the page, and what we do when the studies disagree.
Why it exists
There are two kinds of ACL content in English. Clinic pages, which are short, cautious and end with a phone number. And content farms, which are long, confident and wrong about numbers in a way that is hard to catch unless you go read the study.
This site is the third thing: the actual figures from the actual cohorts, with the identifier so you can check, written for the person doing the rehab rather than for the person billing it.
How a number gets onto a page
- Step 1
Primary source only
Every figure comes from the study abstract or the official document, read directly. No figure is taken from another website's summary of a study.
- Step 2
Written with its context
A hazard ratio without the population is decoration. Cohort size, age range and sport level travel with the number.
- Step 3
Counter-evidence included
When a meta-analysis contradicts a popular threshold, it goes on the page next to the threshold, not in a footnote. The clearest example is Losciale 2019 on return-to-sport criteria.
- Step 4
Listed on the sources page
Every study cited anywhere on the site appears on the sources page with its journal, year and PubMed ID. The list is generated from the same table the pages draw from, so it cannot drift out of sync.
What we could not verify, and therefore did not publish
Three figures that appear on almost every American ACL page are missing from this one, on purpose:
- An average billed cost for ACL reconstruction. The numbers in circulation come from commercial aggregators with no published methodology. Instead we explain the mechanism and send you to your hospital's own machine-readable price file and your plan's allowed amount.
- An average employer-plan deductible. The page usually cited for it no longer resolves. Your own plan documents beat any national average anyway.
- A single ACL-RSI cut-off for everyone. The often-quoted threshold comes from a study of patients 20 and younger, where a score under 76.7 at 12 months flagged 90% of those who went on to a second injury. In older patients the same study found no difference. We report it that way.
Who publishes it
STRATINET SARL, a French company registered in Cannes (RCS Cannes 944 837 871), which also builds the recovery tracker the waitlist is for. We publish in English for a United States audience because that is where the insurance mechanics, the athletic training structure and the return-to-play paperwork described here apply.
Corrections, disagreements and missing studies: [email protected]. If you send us a study that contradicts something here, we will either put it on the page or explain why not.