"A common treatment that uses medical cement to fix cracks in the spinal bones of elderly people worked no better than a sham treatment, the first rigorous studies of the popular procedure reveal.Oops.
Pain and disability were virtually the same up to six months later, whether patients had a real treatment or a fake one.
Tens of thousands of Americans each year are treated with bone cement, especially older women with osteoporosis, some of them stooped and unable to stand up straight. The treatment is so widely believed to work that the researchers had a hard time getting patients to take part when it was explained that half of them would not get the real thing.
'All of us who do the procedure have seen apparently miraculous cures,' said Dr. David F. Kallmes, a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic who led one of the studies. But he said there were also 'miraculous cures' among those who got the fake treatments."
Another truth with an expired shelf life.
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