Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo

For many complaints and conditions, the benefits from surgery are lower, and the risks higher, than you or your surgeon think. In this book you will see how commonly performed operations can be found to be useless or even harmful when properly evaluated. That these claims come from an experienced, practising orthopaedic surgeon who performs many of these operations himself, makes the unsettling argument particularly compelling.

Of course no surgeon is recommending invasive surgery in bad faith, but Ian Harris argues that the evidence for the success for many common operations, including knee arthroscopies, back fusion or cardiac stenting, become current accepted practice without full examination of the evidence. The placebo effect may be real, but is it worth the recovery time, expense and discomfort?

You can listen to Rob Kaldor interview Ian Harris for the Co-op podcast.

Author Biography

Professor Ian Harris AM is a senior orthopaedic surgeon who works at Liverpool, St George, St George Private and Sutherland Hospitals in Sydney. His academic affiliation is with UNSW, South Western Sydney Clinical School at Liverpool Hospital, in Sydney, Austrailia. He has a PhD from the University of Sydney on surgical outcomes. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals.