In July 2002, a landmark study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study was on 180 people who all had painful osteoarthritis of the knee.  

It was the first study of its kind to use something called “sham” or placebo surgery.

That’s when a patient gets anesthesia and two little incisions in their skin…but never actually gets any surgery done. A truly fake surgery.

These patients were evaluated multiple times over a period of two years…and the results shocked the medical establishment.

Arthroscopic surgery of the knee did not work.  In the words of the researchers themselves…the results in the real surgery group were “no better than those after a placebo procedure.”

Since the publication of that study in 2002, there have been MANY follow up studies…nearly all of them with the same conclusion.

The ESCAPE trial published in JAMA found that arthroscopic surgery for degenerative meniscus tears of the knee was useless, even after 5 years of follow up.  

The FIDELITY trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, with a follow up published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2020 again found that arthroscopic knee surgery for degenerative meniscus tears didn’t help…and even INCREASED the risk of developing arthritis.  

Then, just recently a scathing commentary published in JAMA in 2022 points out that there are now decades of research that confirm that arthroscopic knee surgery is no better than placebo… yet the issue and use of these unnecessary, inappropriate, expensive, and dangerous surgeries persist.  

It’s a well-documented and well-known problem.

But, the problem is that physicians and surgeons need to do better at turning what they know into what they actually do!