As reported here in today’s Wall Street Journal, Finnish surgeons split 146 patients with meniscus tears into two groups and ‘scoped them all, but only half had their cartilage removed. The remainder—the control group—underwent all the same post-operative processes and thus remained in the dark that they really did not get the full procedure. The end results showed that any advantages to this ‘partial meniscectomy,’ which purportedly accounts for $4 billion in annual medical costs on the USA alone, are relatively small and short-lived.
Naturally, an independent orthopedic surgeon asked by WSJ to assess these results did not agree that the arthroscopic procedure might be overdone, even though a previous study showed physical therapy to be just as effective for patients with somewhat similar knee problems.
Without strong affirmative evidence from double-blind studies such as this one, I myself am leery of just accepting any given surgeon’s advice to press ahead with a procedure. As Teppo L.N. Järvinen, co-author of the Finnish experiment, says:
Doctors have a bad tendency to confuse what they believe with what they know.
#1 by Brooks Henderson on January 3, 2014 - 6:47 pm
Maybe that’s why Derrick Rose, my favorite teams best basketball player, chose to get the full procedure, not the partial that was in this study. They removed the full meniscus and it’s my understanding that this has better long term effects, but recovery is much longer.
#2 by Ken Johnson on January 15, 2014 - 1:49 pm
Suspect it has little to do with being doctors …