TY - JOUR T1 - Has reimbursement for knee osteoarthritis treatments now reached ‘postfact’ status? JF - British Journal of Sports Medicine JO - Br J Sports Med SP - 1510 LP - 1511 DO - 10.1136/bjsports-2017-097605 VL - 51 IS - 21 AU - John Orchard AU - Maarten H Moen Y1 - 2017/11/01 UR - http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/21/1510.abstract N2 - One of the words of 2016 ‘postfact’ was applied mainly to the field of politics. Many of us working in healthcare, based on science, have been concerned by the recent trend for populists to ‘choose their own facts’. But is healthcare immune to its own versions of fake news and postfact logic? And is it limited to the obvious fringe examples like the antivaccination movement?Many treatments in medicine become popular based on ‘promising’ results from low-quality studies that are subsequently found to be ineffective based on multiple high-quality randomised control trials (RCTs) and their meta-analysis in systematic reviews (SRs).While scientific publication evolves quite rapidly, funding in healthcare is very static. Funding for healthcare procedures historically appears to be based on popularity (widespread use) and expert guidelines rather than evidence based. And then, once funding for a medical procedure becomes ‘established’, the burden of evidence required to remove the funding appears to be very high. However, the … ER -