Rarely discussed is the fact that nearly one in two hundred knee replacement patients dies within ninety days of surgery. Given the extreme popularity of the operation—about seven hundred thousand are performed each year in the United States—an orthopedics journal editor suggested that “people considering this operation are inadequately attuned to the possibility that it may kill them.”273 A surgeon responded by questioning whether patients should be told about what is arguably the “single most-salient fact”:274
