While sitting in a waiting room this evening, I picked up a few-months-old copy of Time which had an article about something called a “sham surgery” which was used to test the effectiveness of knee surgeries. Until tonight, I’d never heard the phrase or known that they did it.
Basically, they have a group of people who think they’re getting surgery, but aren’t. They give them anestesia, place a few superficial cuts where the actual cuts are supposed to go, but don’t actually fix anything. The patient wakes up and goes home none the wiser.
Over the next few months to years, they’ll survey those people and see how they’re doing. Turns out, the people with sham surgeries were not only doing as well, often times they were doing better than those who got the real surgeries!
So what we have here is, admittedly, a very rare experiment done to determine if a procedure is really worth it. The results here, if true, could save billions of dollars a year in unneeded surgeries. But at what cost?
First, however slim the chance, they may have killed the person by knocking him or her out to test their theory.
Second, they charged that person $5,000 to do nothing to them.
Third, they never informed the patient beforehand that having a sham surgery done was a possibility nor did they inform them afterwards of what happened (or refund the money!).
Certainly informing the person ahead of time destroys the accuracy of the conclusions…but not informing them is bad science and unethical.
So what say you? Do the benefits of sham surgeries outweigh the costs?
I find it hard to believe that they could do a two-year experiment without at least telling the people involved that they were involved in an experiment of some kind.
MSNBC.
So they volunteered for the study. They were told they’d have something done to their knee, but not exactly what.
I don’t see a whole lot to get exercised about. They volunteered to participate in a study, and when you volunteer for something like that, I think you ought to expect a few surprises at the end.
And–nobody got hurt. Nobody was deprived of any “healing arts”, or suffered for participating in the study. The whole point of the study is that it proved that after two years, the ones who had real surgery on their knees weren’t any better off than the ones who had nothing done except a few incisions. The ones who had the sham surgery were doing as well as the ones who had real surgery.
It wasn’t like they were testing an anti-cancer drug on cancer patients, and the ones who got the placebo were S.O.L. after two years of no medication.
It was a VA study, done with veterans who were under VA care, so presumably the VA was footing the bill. Nobody was out of pocket except the taxpayer.
Duck Duck Goose, it’s true that no one got hurt. The point is that there was the potential for harm. The data I have is that there are 500 deaths for every 100 million hours of exposure to anesthesia. Admittingly, that gives you less than 1 in a 2000 chance of anything happening in the entire experiment, which is why I’m not harping on it, but the risk is still there.
We’re not just giving people sugar pills. We’re gassing them, cutting them for no good reason, and then tricking them for over two years.
What if someone had died?
What if knee surgeries really were all they were touted to be and people who received sham surgeries were still in pain? Would they stop the experiment and fix the problem or just record the reactions of the “control” group?
Does the end justify the means here? Can we lessen our scientific responsibility and ethics if we think that, down the line, our methods will be helpful?
