Effectiveness of arthroscopic knee surgery one big placebo response?

Here's a video about the amazing study conducted by Bruce Moseley at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He performed standard arthroscopic knee surgery on one group of patients, while in another group, he performed a “sham surgery” — he only made 3 incisions and made all the motions of the real surgery but in fact did nothing else. The sham (placebo) surgery was just as effective at improving pain and function as the real thing. Now, it is definitely premature to say that the benefits of other surgeries are essentially placebos responses, but it does make the point very clear that we must explicitly ascertain what portion of the benefit of a surgery amounts to a placebo response.


The Placebo Effect - Knee Surgery