And the mechanism through which vertebroplasty provided pain relief was a bit of a mystery.
He figured if vertebroplasty was as good as promised, it would be easy to prove.
But the new studies testing vertebroplasty's efficacy took years to perform because doctors were reluctant to enroll patients.
The new studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine today, tested vertebroplasty in a far more rigorous way.
Side effects of vertebroplasty can include cement leakage and the possibility that it could increase the risk of future fractures.
Medtronic is running a 1, 200-patient trial comparing its Kyphon device with the vertebroplasty procedure that failed to beat a fake surgery.
Called vertebroplasty, the procedure involves injecting surgical cement into the vertebrae of patients to relieve pain from spinal fractures due to osteoporosis.
Patients may still ask for vertebroplasty no matter what the results show.
They randomly assigned patients to get either vertebroplasty or a fake procedure in which patients were injected with local anesthetic but no cement.
"There is no plausible reason why it would work where vertebroplasty doesn't work, " said Buchbinder, who calls for blinded trials looking at the benefits of kyphoplasty.
Vertebroplasty was first pioneered in France and has been done in the U.S. since researchers at the University of Virginia reported good results in the 1990s.
Vertebroplasty and a related procedure called kyphoplasty have soared in popularity in recent years after doctors reported apparently miraculous results after trying it on small numbers of patients.
Kallmes did the study because he always though the results reported for vertebroplasty seemed too good to be true--everyone got good results no matter how much cement was injected or what technique was used.
Researchers said the negative vertebroplasty findings raise questions about the effectiveness of a related procedure called kyphoplasty, in which the cement is injected after a small balloon is inflated to restore the shape of the broken vertebra.
But early studies reporting positive results for the vertebroplasty procedure did not have control groups, making it unclear whether the purported benefits were simply due to the placebo effect or the natural tendency of chronic pain to subside over time.
Two landmark studies last year in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a similar spine procedure (vertebroplasty) was no better than a fake operation--raising serious questions over whether the pain relief patients report from kyphoplasty is nothing more than an expensive placebo effect.
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