Surgeons Not Good at Predicting Benefit From Knee Operations (MedScape)
Surgeons are no better at determining which patients might benefit from operations to treat torn knee cartilage than if they just flipped a coin, a new study suggests.
Researchers surveyed 194 surgeons to see whether they would recommend arthroscopic partial meniscectomy (APM) or exercise therapy in 20 test cases with middle-aged patients who had tears in the meniscus.
Researchers created test cases based on actual patients to see whether the surgeons could accurately predict who would benefit the most, or least, from surgery or from exercise therapy.
Overall, surgeons correctly predicted which patients would benefit from operations only half of the time. And experienced knee surgeons were no better at guessing correctly than other orthopedic surgeons.
These findings offer one reason these knee operations remain common despite a growing body of evidence suggesting many patients don't benefit, said Dr. Victor van de Graaf, lead author of the study and a researcher at University Medical Centre, Utrecht, in the Netherlands.
"Orthopedic surgeons believe they are capable of identifying which patients may still benef...
