How Fake Surgery Exposes Useless Treatments
February 6, 2018
(Scientific American) – And yet sham surgery studies are rarely done, especially in the U.S., where ethics boards resist subjecting patients to incisions, anesthesia and other risks without delivering an actual treatment. Redberg, who has written about the value of these studies, takes the opposite view: “I think it’s unethical not to do them.” Otherwise you may be exposing millions of people to the risks and the financial costs of surgery for a placebo effect that will not likely last.