Tens of thousands patients’ lives at risk by ‘POINTLESS operations which are no better than placebo’
Researchers say knee arthroscopies, incisions for migraines and stomach balloons for the morbidly obese are costly and unnecessary
TENS of thousands of patients' lives are being put at risk by "pointless operations", it's been claimed.
Several common procedures including knee arthroscopies, incisions for migraines and stomach balloons for the morbidly obese are costly and unnecessary, according to research.
Scientists say the operations have little or no benefit beyond a placebo effect - and are costing the NHS millions of pounds every year, according to The Times.
They claim many other operations may be similarly flawed because they haven't been through rigorous trials against placebo that new drugs face.
A landmark trial at Oxford University tested the most common kind of shoulder surgery - carried out on 10,000 patients every year in the UK - against a sham version.
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The findings will be published in the next few months and are being closely monitored by bosses keen to cut costs as the NHS remains under serious financial strain.
Professor Andrew Carr, who is leading the research, told the newspaper: “The correct thing has got to be to do the trials, not to continue doing operations where we don’t know whether or not there’s a strong placebo component or an entire placebo component, because that means that tens or hundreds of thousands of patients are having unnecessary operations."
He also said surgeons need to be more honest with their patients about the benefits even if they choose to undergo a risky operation in order to take advantaged of a placebo effect.
Academics have also raised concerns about the value of operations which attempt to curb pain and where nothing is repaired or reconstructed.
Senior orthopaedic surgeon Bruce Moseley, of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, said these are "mostly or entirely beneficial due to the placebo effect.”
In his research he found that real surgery was no more effective than cutting open the patient and closing the wound under general anaesthetic in half of the 53 studies comparing the two.
He also found that in three quarter of the trials the patients improved significantly after sham surgery.
Some operations are gradually being scrapped after experiments showed little or no more than a placebo effect - including keyhole surgery for repairing a torn knee cartilage in the over 50s, according to the Royal college of Surgeons.
Surgeries to inject fat into a woman's urethra lining to help with stress incontinence has also been abandoned.
It comes after an evil surgeon was jailed for carrying out needless breast operations on women, leaving patients scarred and disfigured.
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