The most common symptom that an orthopaedic surgeon treats is pain, while simple in concept it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to pin down the cause. The picture is a bed of nails, CC by Ormando Madoery

Degenerative meniscal tears in the knee are a truly elusive problem for orthopaedic surgeons. As I have previously posted, degenerative meniscal tears are a common MRI finding in the healthy population above 40 years of age, and fail to correlate with actual knee symptoms, such as pain. As a surgeon it is tempting to try surgery for these injuries, but there is an increasing pile of evidence against this. This post is a comment on the most recent evidence, a NEJM study by Katz et al. Continue reading →