Minimal access hip arthroscopy surgery has become the treatment of choice for hip pain in young adults, especially athletes, but a team of McMaster University surgeons is looking to see if the procedure is a sham.
To evaluate the surgery, the team is examining how patients do after having hip arthroscopy operations and comparing those results to patients undergoing a placebo surgery that skips the step of actual repair and tests whether patients feel relief.
In North America, arthroscopic hip surgeries have replaced open surgeries as the go-to cure for femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), a common source of hip pain in young adults, where abnormal femurs lead to damaged cartilage in the hip joint.
