From Medscape Medical News, 18 June 2025:
At the recent World Congress on Osteoarthritis (OARSI) 2025 Annual Meeting in Incheon, South Korea, speaker after speaker presented on studies that were carefully designed to identify even the smallest benefit of interventions, including drugs, physical therapy, exercise therapy, and even surgery, compared with placebo. And in many cases, the benefit wasn’t there.
It’s not that the interventions didn’t achieve anything. Most did show improvements in pain and even function. But the problem was that the placebo did as well. In control groups, patients given in some cases the barest minimum of care — a pamphlet and advice — and in other cases everything up to and including sham ultrasound and faked surgery showed improvements in pain and function that defied orthopedic explanation.
This isn’t a new problem — a trial published more than two decades ago found no additional benefit of knee arthroscopy in people with knee osteoarthritis compared to placebo surgery. Nor is the problem limited to osteoarthritis; there’s evidence for a strong placebo effect in numerous chronic musculoskeletal conditions, including tennis elbow, shoulder pain, meniscal tears, and low back pain. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 