Yes! It's common to run clinical trials comparing different types of implants, different surgical approaches, and even decisions on when/if to do the surgery at

Yes! It's common to run clinical trials comparing different types of implants, different surgical approaches, and even decisions on when/if to do the surgery at all. On the other hand, they are relatively to run and interpret. For a drug trial, you can give everybody a fixed dose of a drug (X mg; Y mg/kg bodyweight) in a fixed way (pill, injection, etc). Surgery is a lot harder to standardize. Along with the patient-to-patient variability, there's also surgeon-to-surgeon variability. Different surgeons might be faster or slower, cut more (and get a better visualization of whatever they're doing) or less (reduced tissue damage). Moreover, the individual surgeons improve with practice and it sometimes takes a lot (e.g., 100-200 knee arthroscopies) to plateau, which makes it tricky to evaluate a totally new method. This is a nice paper discussing some of the issues in more detail: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5415901/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5415901/