Thousands of NHS operations could be pointless

Tens of thousands of people could be undergoing needless operations due to lack of research on a ‘placebo component’ which causes patients to feel like their symptoms have improved after treatment, a leading surgeon has said.

Professor Andy Carr has recently conducted a trial that tested the UK’s most common shoulder surgery, which is performed on about 10,000 patients each year, against an artificial version of the same treatment.

The orthopaedic surgeon at Oxford University Hospitals has said that ‘tens or hundreds of thousands’ of people could potentially be undergoing unnecessary surgery, although the results are due to be published next month.

Trials on operations where the placebo component isn’t obvious are not being conducted and could decrease the amount of people who need to go under the knife, he added.

Carr said: “The correct thing has got to be to do the trials - not to continue doing operations where we don’t know whether or not there’s a strong placebo component or an entire placebo component because that means that tens or hundreds of thousands of patients are having unnecessary operations.”

Researches have criticised the procedures not just because they are time-consuming and costly, but because they have not undergone the accurate trials against placebo that new drugs face.