I’m glad to find that this article by Dr Jerome Groopman, which I read in the hardcopy of the latest New Yorker, is online for me to blink to. A Knife in the Back should be read by anyone with chronic back pain before they make a decision about whether to have surgery. This is a blunt and disturbing exploration of the ways in which the comfort of the familiar, the power of paradigms to withstand accumulating counter-evidence, market forces and just plain greed and ignorance conspire to maintain a steady stream of referrals for procedures that are not likely to be of help and can easily make things worse. Except that he is a sufferer from chronic back pain himself, Dr Groopman appears to have no vested interests in writing this beyond alerting the public to a widespread travesty of medical practice.