In July 2002, orthopedic surgeon J. Bruce Moseley and a Houston Veterans Affairs team reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that 180 patients with osteoarthritis of the knee, randomized double-blind to arthroscopic débridement, arthroscopic lavage, or a sham operation in which surgeons made skin incisions but inserted no instrument, had identical outcomes — and the gap between that finding and a decade of confident practice is the entire case. By 2002 the scope-and-clean operation for the arthritic knee was being performed on the order of 650,000 times a year in the United States at roughly $5,000 apiece, a multi-billion-dollar standard of care, on the mechanistic premise that flushing out debris and trimming frayed cartilage relieved pain. The trial showed it relieved nothing the placebo did not.
The harm here was not a body count of deaths but of unnecessary operations: hundreds of thousands of patients each year underwent a real surgery — anesthesia, incisions, infection risk, recovery, deductibles — to obtain a benefit indistinguishable from being wheeled into an operating room, cut, and sewn shut. At no point over two years of follow-up did either intervention group report less pain or better function than the sham group; the 95 percent confidence intervals excluded any clinically meaningful difference. The wonder of arthroscopy had been real for torn menisci and loose bodies, but for arthritis pain it was theater.
What makes the episode an exemplar of withdrawal is that it was killed by the right kind of evidence. Surgery had long been treated as exempt from the placebo-controlled standard demanded of drugs, on the assumption that an operation cannot ethically be faked. Moseley’s team did precisely that — and the result was so clean that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services moved within a year to defund the procedure for osteoarthritis. A 2008 Canadian trial led by Alexandra Kirkley confirmed that arthroscopy added nothing to optimized physical and medical therapy, and by 2017 international guideline panels were issuing strong recommendations against it. The operation was never recalled or banned. It was disconfirmed, defunded, and abandoned — a textbook demonstration that a popular surgery can be a placebo, and that without a sham control no one would have known.
In 1987 the French neuroradiologist Hervé Galibert reported injecting acrylic bone cement into a single cervical vertebra eaten away by a hemangioma, and by the mid-1990s that salvage technique had been repurposed into a booming outpatient business — percutaneous vertebroplasty for the painful spinal fractures of ordinary osteoporosis — on the strength of nothing but uncontrolled case series in which patients reported feeling better; the gap between that universal operator conviction that the procedure plainly worked and what a blinded comparison actually showed is the entire case. When the procedure was finally tested against a credible fake in 2009, the cement turned out to do nothing the placebo did not do.
The clinical claim was seductive and mechanically intuitive: drive a needle through the back under imaging, inject polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) into the collapsed vertebral body, stabilize the fracture, and abolish pain — often, operators said, on the table. By the mid-2000s the operation and its cousin kyphoplasty were a multibillion-dollar global market; U.S. Medicare alone was paying for vertebral augmentation in roughly a fifth to a quarter of compression-fracture patients, on the order of tens of thousands of procedures a year. The evidence underneath was almost entirely uncontrolled. Pain from an acute vertebral fracture improves substantially on its own over weeks, and a needle in the back is a powerful theatrical placebo — two facts the case series could not separate from any true effect of the cement.
On 6 August 2009 the New England Journal of Medicine published, in a single issue, two independent randomized double-blind sham-controlled trials. David Kallmes’s multicenter INVEST trial (131 patients) and Rachelle Buchbinder’s Australian trial (78 patients) both gave control patients the full ritual — the same positioning, the same local anesthetic, the same room, the smell of mixed cement — but no PMMA. Both found no meaningful difference. Pain and disability fell sharply in both arms, by roughly the same amount, at every follow-up point.
No agency banned vertebroplasty and no court enjoined it. It was discredited by its own pivotal trials and then slowly throttled by guidelines, payers, and a 2018 Cochrane review, surviving today only as a restricted, narrow-indication option rather than the routine fracture treatment it had been. It stands as the textbook modern lesson that a procedure can feel like it works to every operator and every patient and still be a placebo — and that the only way to know is the sham control almost nobody wanted to run.