Is that knee surgery a procedure you really need?
If you’ve got chronic knee pain, you’re hobbling around on a gold mine.
Unfortunately, that pot of gold isn’t going to do YOU a bit of good. In fact, just the opposite.
All you get is the pain, while others get the gain.
In this case I’m talking specifically about the pain that radiates out of your menisci, the discs of cartilage that act like protective shock absorbers between your knee bones. Over time, menisci can deteriorate to the point where they start to tear, and that’s when the pain really kicks in.
And that’s where one of the biggest scams in medicine kicks in, too.
If your MRI shows a torn meniscus, then an orthopedic surgeon will probably tell you not to wait another minute — millions of people have a common surgical procedure done every year to fix it.
But what he won’t tell you is that the huge majority of those surgeries are completely unnecessary.
They say that the knees are the first to go! And if you look at the mega-bucks knee surgeries bring in, that pretty much proves the saying to be true.
Now, a new study has further validated research I first told you about over a decade ago, and then again in 2014. In a study that year, half of the patients got arthroscopic (or keyhole) surgery to remove part of the meniscus cartilage, while the other patients were given a sham operation (how’s that for ironic?) where they were led to believe they’d actually had surgery.
In the group that had the real surgery, 93 percent said they were satisfied with the outcome. But in the sham surgery group, an astounding 96 percent said their knees felt like new again!
The newest study — recently reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) — has the familiar ring of déjà vu all over again.
In this case, half of the patients underwent arthroscopic surgery, while the other half got supervised exercise for 12 weeks.
And the results…
Two years after surgery or exercise therapy, there were no differences between the two groups in their reported levels of pain or their “knee-related quality of life.” Knee function in recreation and sports was the same as well. But there was one big difference — three months into the study, muscle strength was better in the exercise group.
Of course, the exercise route also means no hospital time, no surgical recovery, less expense, and unlike surgery, there’s little chance of botching your exercise routine and zero chance of getting a hospital-acquired infection!
All of this, of course, is public knowledge. Everybody in the orthopedic surgery world knows what’s going on. Even so, doctors coax about two million people every year into signing on for this surgery, racking up medical bills that soar into the billions.
If you’re wondering how this sham keeps right on going, two experts in the field explain it all in a BMJ editorial. They say, “Essentially, good evidence has been widely ignored.”
But then they really hit the nail on the head by calling this surgery a “widespread use of procedures for which there has never been compelling evidence.”
In other words, too many surgeons are making easy money off of useless surgery on bum knees in an aging population.
So if one or more of those bum knees belong to you, before you sign on the dotted line for an operation, get a second or third opinion.
Or even better, ask your doctor to refer you to a good physical therapist before you’re hustled into the operating room.
Sources:
“Surgery no better than exercise for knee damage” Nick Tate, July 21, 2016, NewsMax, newsmax.com
