>It's what doctors and patients said about knee arthroscopy for rheumatoid arthritus until they did a trial involving sham operations. small correction; The NE

>It's what doctors and patients said about knee arthroscopy for rheumatoid arthritus until they did a trial involving sham operations. small correction; The NEJM studies (below), to which your comment was probably referring, were actually for arthroscopic surgery in osteoarthritis patients, not rheumatoid. It's quite common to think these conditions are similar, but are really rather different, with diverse etiologies. RA is considered an autoimmune disease, whereas OA is not. update: included subsequent years (2002) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259 (2008) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0708333 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0708333 (2013) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1301408 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1301408