In its September 2020 issue, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published an editorial “When taking a step back is a veritable leap forward. Reversing decades of arthroscopy for managing joint pain: five reasons that could explain declining rates of common arthroscopic surgeries” written by Ardern and co-workers [1]. In this editorial, which focused on “meniscal” pain in the middle-aged patient (in fact, degenerative meniscal lesions), the authors point out the pre-eminence of non-surgical treatment and they correctly observe the decreasing rate of meniscal surgery over time. However, at the same time, they assert that orthopaedic surgeons and their representative scientific societies would act as a brake and even a resistance to the generalisation of non-surgical treatment, while still generally promoting arthroscopic partial meniscectomy (APM) in degenerative meniscal lesions (DML). They also call on patients to resist and on official public healthcare systems to publish imposed regulations promoting non-surgical treatment or no treatment at all, even in symptomatic patients.
