Michael Valentine
Michael is our highlighted student for the month of September. Michael is currently a fourth-year medical student applying for residency in radiology programs. He is originally from the great state of Texas and has always enjoyed participating in athletics, especially tennis and pickleball. He lived abroad in Brazil for 2 years, where he served others and became fluent in the Portuguese language. Prior to medical school, he attended undergraduate school at the University of Utah. He is currently attending Kansas City University for medical school where he has been heavily involved with research including many publications and presentations. When not studying, you can find him playing pickleball, hanging out with his wife, or taking his dogs to the dog park.
This research project, titled “Lower Back Pain: A Readability Analysis” was presented by Michael at at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine – Educating Leaders ’24. This project delves into the readability of online patient education material that is readily available on the Internet. Michael and his team used the popular search engine Google to identify the top 23 URLs for informative articles that result from patients seeking information on lower back pain. Using a variety of text analysis tools and scores, the text was systematically evaluated to see if the resources found had a grade reading level of sixth or lower, which is the recommended reading level that the American Medical Association (AMA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) have expressed. The results from the study indicate that the 23 most popular resources from a Google search about Lower Back Pain consistently had a grade reading level of 10.745, five grades above the suggested reading level for patient education material.
