The lines separating politics and the medical device industry have long been erased as industry, regulators and insurers wrangle over critical issues like innovation, product approval and compensation for medical care. But the New England Journal of Medicine tossed itself into the tangle last month by publishing two clinical trials that called into question the efficacy of vertebroplasty, the increasingly common procedure that involves the percutaneous injection of bone cement in the core of a fractured vertebra.
Surgeons swear by the procedure which is said to give recipients a new chance at life as chronic pain disappears...