Ten years ago, a scan showed that I had torn the meniscus in my knee. The pain was bad and I was limping a lot of the time. My doctor recommended arthroscopic knee surgery to fix it.
Being scared of scalpels, I asked whether there were other options. He said I could try physiotherapy, but that it was unlikely to work. I tried the physio and did the recommended exercises diligently, and my knee pain and function returned to almost normal.
I even ran my first (and only) marathon a year later. Physio isn’t the only thing that might work as well as arthroscopic knee surgery. In the 1990s, Dr Bruce Moseley found 180 patients who had such severe knee pain that they had trouble getting out of their chairs.
They then either received real or sham (placebo) arthroscopy. Real arthroscopy involved giving painkillers and inserting a small metal tube (an arthroscope) into the knee to repair damaged cartilage and remove loose bone fragments that cause pain. The sham (placebo) arthroscopy procedure included painkillers and a small cut on their knees, but there was no arthroscope, no repairing of damaged cartilage and no cleaning out loose fragments of bone.
Patients receiving the sham procedure thought they were receiving the real one (this is called “blinding”). And the doctors and nurses mimicked the sounds of real surgery. Blinding is considered important for preventing patients’ expectations from influencing the results.
All the patients were monitored for two years to see how ma.
