Study shows value of knee replacement surgery, other options

People with knees worn out by arthritis will get more pain relief from joint replacement surgery, but it has more risks and there's a good chance that less drastic approaches also would help. That's the bottom line from the first study to strictly test other treatments against knee replacement, an operation done hundreds of thousands of times a year in the U.S. "It's one of the great operations of the 20th century," yet good evidence of its effectiveness has been lacking, said Dr. Jeffrey Katz, a joint specialist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.