1. Arthroscopic Treatment of Osteoarthritis of the Knee
- Author
-
J. Bruce Moseley, Kimberly J. O'Malley, and Nelda P. Wray
- Subjects
Male ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Osteoarthritis ,Placebo ,Severity of Illness Index ,Cohort Studies ,External validity ,Arthroscopy ,medicine ,Humans ,Orthopedics and Sports Medicine ,In patient ,Internal validity ,business.industry ,Reproducibility of Results ,General Medicine ,Osteoarthritis, Knee ,medicine.disease ,Treatment Outcome ,Orthopedic surgery ,Cohort ,Physical therapy ,Arthroscopic lavage ,Female ,Surgery ,business - Abstract
To The Editor: We appreciate Dr. Fowler's positive comments on our study ("Arthroscopic Lavage or Debridement Did Not Reduce Pain More Than Placebo Did in Patients with Osteoarthritis" [ N Engl J Med. 2002;347:81-8]) in Evidence-Based Orthopaedics ( J Bone Joint Surg Am. 2002;84:387) regarding the internal validity of the study, and we wish to address his concerns regarding its external validity. We believe that all of his concerns are due to our inability to include all of our data in the article because of the limitations placed on its length by The New England Journal of Medicine . Dr. Fowler argued that, although our results were valid in the spectrum of patients whom we studied, these results might not apply more generally. First, we used the system of Kellgren and Lawrence 1 to classify each patient's study knee according to the severity of osteoarthritis. Our study cohort included thirty patients whose study …
- Published
- 2003
- Full Text
- View/download PDF