Dealing with the degenerative meniscus – to cut or not to cut?

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 and CC by Ormando Madoery

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