Surgical masks: wheres the real-life evidence?
Surgery. What images come to mind when you read that word? Sharp scalpels? Bright lights? Surgeons in masks? Now, how much randomised evidence do you think there is for each of these? And, how uncertain are you about their benefits and harms? It is difficult to imagine anyone doing a randomised trial of sharp versus blunt scalpels or dim versus bright lights, but what about wearing or not wearing surgical masks? A new Cochrane review tackles this last issue and finds that the randomised evidence is rare and not convincing. This might not matter if the issue to be addressed was the sharpness of scalpels or the brightness of lights. We probably don’t need randomised evidence to know that a sharp knife will cut better than a blunt one. However, there is a school of thought which says that wearing surgical masks might actually be worse for the patient than not wearing them, and some surgery is now done without masks. This is discussed in the Background of the new review. Some of the sugges
