Arthroscopic surgery for knee pain: a highly questionable practice without supporting evidence of even moderate quality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With 150 000 knee arthroscopies carried out in the United Kingdom each year, and about five times that number in the United States,1 ,2 arthroscopic partial meniscectomy—keyhole surgery for middle aged to older adults with knee pain to trim a torn meniscus—is one of the most common surgical procedures. Considering the enormous volume, it is natural to think that there is compelling evidence for the procedure being beneficial. Remarkably, this is not so. It is barely a decade since the publication of the first controlled trial addressing knee arthroscopy using placebo surgery as a comparator.3 Since then a series of rigorous trials, summarised in two recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses, provide compelling evidence that arthroscopic knee surgery offers little benefit for most patients with knee pain.4 ,5 The latest nail into what should be …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.159 | 0.483 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".