Preventing Harm through Appropriate Surgical Intervention: An Ethical Analysis of Orthopedic Arthroscopic Surgery

Arthroscopic surgery (AS) for chronic joint pain has demonstrated limited and inconsistent long-term benefit over conservative management (CM), despite evidence of possible short-term symptomatic improvement in selected populations. Arguments supporting continued use often rely on informed consent. However, informed consent alone cannot justify an intervention without a reasonable expectation of meaningful patient benefit along with a favorable risk-benefit ratio. This paper proposes an ethical framework for evaluating when offering OAS may remain ethically justified despite limited evidence of long-term efficacy. We first identify two primary ethical considerations that should generally guide decisions regarding OAS: (1) the expectation of meaningful patient benefit, including long-term clinical improvement, prevention of greater structural harm, or other sufficiently important patient-centered outcomes, and (2) a favorable risk-benefit assessment that incorporates procedural risk as well as financial and opportunity costs. We then explore additional categories of patient-specific benefit-including temporal; psychological and identity-related; social and caregiving; and harm-reduction considerations-which, in selected cases, may constitute ethically relevant forms of benefit or avoided harm that support offering surgery even when traditional measures of long-term efficacy would otherwise not. Together, these considerations suggest that AS should not be routine but may be ethically appropriate in carefully selected cases where patient-specific factors meaningfully influence the overall risk-benefit balance.