Gagsd4 thanks for  posting study which supports what I am saying all the people who were up in arms about my  "trashing" of OFA should read that!!!!!!!
 

THIS IS WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT!!!!!

 Take a note that there are grades with discrepancy of 1-4(!!!) grades. FROM MODERATE DYSPLASIA TO ofa GOOD!!!!!!!
Is this reliable system ? And look at the positioning of he dogs accepted by OFA. 
Here is the link one more time for your convenience. 
http://troyanimalhospital.com/troy-animal-hospital/files/2012/08/Variation_in_O.F.A.pdf
 

 

Hexe that is scary!!! ( Referring to your " of what is unspoken".)  I guess I will write on the end of every post:
I x ray all breeding dogs and do not breed dysplastic dogs.
I did not know that there are serious breeders who have excuse for not x raying their breeding dogs. 

Hans, on that we do agree.  Sadly, tricksters and opportunists learned that they could get away with a lot of self-serving behavior and actions by saying some things while conveniently NOT saying other things that were related to the first. They couldn't be held accountable for what they didn't say.  Thus it is essential to get specific these days, and not leave any 'loopholes', as those will undeniably be exploited by someone, at some point.

Table 3 is a synopsis showing that almost very single dog with an upgrade was done while awake but failed when sedated.This vet says he doesn't sedate, uses some sort of a cradle,  since he thinks that sedation doesn't matter when he uses his device. Obviously it did matter if  the same dogs that failed when sedated passed when xrayed while awake.  Which xrays should be trusted to reflect the true status of the dogs' hips?  I don't know.

WRT to the article written by Dr. Davis, I'll withhold any comment until after it's been through the peer-review process.  Not saying this as any commentary on Dr. Davis' work or his paper, but there's an excellent piece in the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic entitled, "The Data Vigilante", describing a disturbing situation wherein data had been manipulated by two researchers, in two unrelated studies, order to 'prove' the conclusions they wished to arrive upon. The fraud was discovered when another researcher began to question one of the studies because the results simply didn't make scientific sense; that researcher, Uri Simonsohn, outlines that process in an article that's presently published on-line, "Just Post It: The Lesson From Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone". 

LOL, I don't know how "serious" they are, but a few are regular posters to this board. Some don't xray at all, say clear dogs still produce HD, so what's the point. A few others do xray but they still use dogs that don't pass (and I'm not necessarily talking borderline to mild HD).

Blitzen.
You then must take into account the one which is positioned properly.
 If the hips are bad you can not make them look good.No matter what you do. 
Cradle is a device which must be used in Czech for example if the dog is x rayed for official evaluation. By positioning you can not make bad hips look good but you can make good hips look bad if the positioning is not done properly. Cradle prevents that. Anesthesia helps position the dog properly because the dog is not fighting it. But skilled vet can take good x ray even if the dog is not sedated.   Sedation also  allows the femur to be pulled out of the socket because the dog relaxes his muscles. There is a lot of disputation if that is proper or not. General consensus is that sedated dog whose x rays show  good hips has definitely good hips. The discussion is hard on the topic if the dog is sedated and his femoral heads get pulled out of the socket if that constitutes bad hips since dogs do not walk around sedated. OFA allows sedated or not sedated  dogs during x ray and there is a field on application to be marked accordingly. . Good radiologist will take into account if the dog was sedated or not and results should not show any difference if the positioning is  done properly. The cradle then assures proper positioning if the dog is sedated or not. 
Hans 

Yeah, that's the big negative with the net, have to spend time researching before believing. I think one could probably find someone who swears they own a critter sired by a GSD out of a wild woman. When I worked as a tech, one of our more disturbed clients called me at work telling me she knew who was stealing all the dogs we were looking for (we had a dog fighting ring operating in the area). Her neighbors is stealing those dogs to have sex with and producing animals with human bodies and dog heads. She sees them running around the woods behind her house. He had raped her too and broke her back and now he needed to pay for her tombstone. The vet I was working for was there at the time and he asked her if she could capture us a breeding pair, she said they were too fast. True story, I swear. She would have been on the net 24/7 had it been avalable then. I think she ended up institutionalized.

As this thread has progressed, it is obvious who has the most depth of knowledge concerning hips, while this is not a guarantee, in my experience  this is usually a good foundation for achieving excellence.(unless someone is unethical and I feel confident that most of the posters on this thread are seeking the same end result). I think this thread has really enlightened a lot of viewers.And at the end of the day I think that is far more important than who is right or wrong.!

 I think Blitzen's crazy lady posts on the PDB. 

Amen, Gustav.