A patient reports knee pain; an MRI shows a torn meniscus; naturally, a surgeon wants to fix it. When five orthopedic clinics in Finland compared the surgery with “sham surgery”—that is, surgeons took patients with knee pain and a torn meniscus to operating rooms, made incisions, faked surgeries, and sewed them back up and sent them to physical therapy—they found that sham surgery worked just as well. Most people with a torn meniscus, it turns out, don’t have any symptoms at all and will never even know. And for those who do have a torn meniscus and knee pain, the tear may have nothing to do
...more
