Ten years ago, a scan showed that I had torn the meniscus in my knee. The pain was bad and I was limping a lot of the time. My doctor recommended arthroscopic knee surgery to fix it.
Being scared of scalpels, I asked whether there were other options. He said I could try physiotherapy, but that it was unlikely to work. I tried the physio and did the recommended exercises diligently, and my knee pain and function returned to almost normal. I even ran my first (and only) marathon a year later.
Physio isn’t the only thing that might work as well as arthroscopic knee surgery. In the 1990s, Dr Bruce Moseley found 180 patients who had such severe knee pain that they had trouble getting out of their chairs. They then either received real or sham (placebo) arthroscopy.
