Physical Therapy Valid Meniscus Treatment

Each year more than 450, 000 arthroscopic surgeries are performed in the United States to treat meniscal tears. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, realizing that scant data exist to help doctors determine whether physical therapy or surgery is the better treatment for a patient, decided to look further into the situation.

Researchers randomly assigned a study group of 151 patients, all over age 45 with knee pain, meniscal tear and knee osteoarthritis, to be treated with either arthroscopic surgery or physical therapy. When they assessed them 6 and 12 months later, both groups had substantial and similar improvements in movement. The study waspresented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), is to be published online and in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Since both the patients who received physical therapy and those who received surgery had similar and considerable improvements in function and pain, our research shows that there is no single ‘best’ treatment, ” principal investigator Jeffrey Katz, M.D. said in a hospital news release.

He added, “Patients who wish to avoid surgery can be reassured that physical therapy is a reasonable option, although they should recognize that not everyone will improve with physical therapy alone. In this study, one-third of patients who received physical therapy ultimately chose to have surgery, often because they did not improve with [physical therapy].”

“The article reinforces the standard that if a patient suffers a degenerative meniscal tear related to mild to moderate osteoarthritis then the first line of treatment is typically physical therapy, ” said Leon Popovitz, M.D.., an orthopedic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.