The column is fudging the facts to justify its bombast title. Example: > A systematic review found that placebo was just as effective as surgery in over half

The column is fudging the facts to justify its bombast title. Example: > A systematic review found that placebo was just as effective as surgery in over half of the cases studied, and all of the recent trials comparing surgery to placebo have found that surgery was no better than placebo. We note that that the text doesn't tell us...: 1. which kind of operation is supposedly not very helpful. 2. which kind of medical condition(s) were studied. 3. whether the relevant medical condition is transitory/accute or chronic; 4. whether the condition is known to be amenable to non-surgical treatment; 5. what review this was, exactly, and where one can read the details. 6. what, exactly, the review reviewed. 7. what happened in the less-than-half the cases. 8. what chances of success the surgery purports to have. i.e. it might be a surgery which proponents suggest solves the problem in 45% of cases and has little effect (but no significant negative effect) in 55% percent of cases - in which case you "get what it says on the label". Also, I would assume are almost no, or no trials comparing surgery to placebo where surgery is known, or reasonably assumed, to be efficacious. So those "recent trials" probably considered surgical procedures which are apriori under suspicion of not being efficacious. etc.