Ottawa ankle rules

In medicine, the Ottawa ankle rules are a set of guidelines for clinicians to help decide if a patient with foot or ankle pain should be offered X-rays to diagnose a possible bone fracture. Before the introduction of the rules most patients with ankle injuries would have been imaged. However the vast majority of patients with unclear ankle injuries do not have bone fractures.^[1] As a result, many unnecessary X-rays were taken, which was costly, time-consuming and a slight health risk due to radiation exposure.