Sham surgery

Today I learned about sham surgeries. The best way to determine if a surgery works is to give that surgery to a bunch of people, and pretend to give the same surgery to a bunch of other people, and measure the effects of both groups.

This is because it isolates the specific effects of the treatment as opposed to the incidental effects caused by anesthesia, the incisional trauma, pre- and postoperative care, and the patient’s perception of having had a regular operation. Thus sham surgery serves an analogous purpose to placebo drugs, neutralizing biases such as the placebo effect.

Wikipedia

The ethics of this are fascinating. It seems like the patient usually has to sign a thing saying they understand they may not get the real surgery, but there’s still a lot of spicy controversy. Some patients had holes drilled in their skull to make the sham surgery more realistic. If you’re interested in this rabbit hole, start here.

A decent number of surgeries have been proven to do basically nothing.