Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo

A Surgeon Cuts through the Evidence

Ian Harris

• Publisher: NewSouth
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781742242309
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

For many complaints and conditions, the benefits from surgery are lower, and the risks higher, than you or your surgeon think. In this book you will see how commonly performed operations can be found to be useless or even harmful when properly evaluated. That these claims come from an experienced, practising orthopaedic surgeon who performs many of these operations himself, makes the unsettling argument particularly compelling. Of course no surgeon is recommending invasive surgery in bad faith, but Ian Harris argues that the evidence for the success for many common operations, including knee arthroscopies, back fusion or cardiac stenting, become current accepted practice without full examination of the evidence. The placebo effect may be real, but is it worth the recovery time, expense and discomfort?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The placebo effect
• 2. The science of medicine – or lack of it
• 3. Building the perfect placebo
• 4. Putting surgery to the (placebo) test
• 5. The surgical scrap heap
• 6. Today’s placebo surgeries
• 7. Why do we still do it?
• 8. Surgery has a placebo effect – so what?
• 9. What can we do about it?
• References
• Acknowledgements