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Useless Health Care

By Stuart Buck

A while back, I noticed that I had seen several news stories about treatments or medications that turned out to be useless or even harmful. So I started keeping a file that I've been regularly updating (I'm aware, of course, that this could be seen as an exercise in confirmation bias). The list has grown long enough that I'm putting it here for reference. 1. Knee operations can be more harmful than plain old rehab. One randomized experiment found that exercise was as good as surgery at helping with patello-femoral syndrome, and another study found that placebo surgery was as good as actual surgery at helping with osteoarthritis. A more recent article broadly claims that "evidence of benefit is lacking for many common ways of treating osteoarthritis of the knee...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on March 25, 2008 (boomark / email).