Because there are no known treatments that alter the natural course of the pathophysiology of osteoarthritis, nonoperative treatment needs to be compared with known effective treatments that seek to mitigate symptoms or with similarly invasive inert (placebo) treatments to determine effectiveness. Comparing a treatment to an uninformative control group may inappropriately legitimize and support the use of potentially ineffective treatments. We therefore investigated the prevalence of inappropriate control groups in musculoskeletal research and asked whether these are associated with reporting a positive treatment effect.

中文翻译：

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研究骨关节炎非手术治疗的随机对照试验经常使用误导性和信息量不足的对照组：系统评价。


由于没有已知的治疗方法可以改变骨关节炎病理生理学的自然病程，因此需要将非手术治疗与寻求减轻症状的已知有效治疗或类似侵入性惰性（安慰剂）治疗进行比较，以确定有效性。将治疗与信息不足的对照组进行比较可能会不恰当地合法化和支持使用可能无效的治疗方法。因此，我们调查了肌肉骨骼研究中不适当对照组的普遍性，并询问这些是否与报告积极的治疗效果有关。