A new study revealed that it doesn’t really matter whether a patient receives fake knee surgery over real knee surgery because both can effectively reduce pain from torn knee cartilage.
Dr. Teppo Jarvinen, lead author of the study from the University of Helsinki, and his colleagues recruited 146 participants complaining of knee pain for at least three months associated to broken knee cartilage. They were tested to make sure that their knee pain was not caused by other conditions.
Five medical centers participated in the study where the knee surgeries were performed. The participants had no idea who among them will be given fake knee surgery, though they were informed that some will.
So what’s the difference of fake and real surgery? It’s in the blade of the microshaver. The blade was removed for those who underwent the fake procedure. Their knee cartilage were not removed in the process but were left to stay in the operating room of the same period as a real knee surgery procedure.
After the knee surgeries, the researchers monitored the progress of the participants. They found that there was no significant difference on the improvement of both groups 12 months after the surgery. About 89 percent of those who had real knee surgery considered the procedure successful while it was 83 percent for those who had the fake procedure. Even the satisfaction rating was not that far, 77 percent and 70 percent respectively.
However, experts were not that convinced on the results of the study.
Dr. Craig Bennett, assistant professor of Orthopedics at the University of Maryland Medical Center, told Reuters that the findings seemed “over-generalized.”
"The implications are fairly profound," said Jeffrey Katz, a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told the Wall Street Journal. "There may be some relatively small advantages to meniscal surgery, but they're short-lived."
The study was published in the December 25 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
