Thx@teacher

it certainly sounds promising! I have suffered with numerous tendonopathies over the years and tried all sorts of treatments. I have also tried to get to the bottom of the published research on the subject. It’s distinctly murky

I have several comments on this study:

• it was tiny. 30 patients in total.
• it was not blinded, or indeed double blinded

what this means is both the patients and the investigators knew what treatment was being administered. This is not considered a good way to run trials. It does not allow for placebo effects to be excluded.

• Of particular note, 7 patients dropped out of the steroid arm. These patients should be excluded from the study, not, trumpeted as treatment failure.
• There was no attempt to design the study to adequately power it to prove the desired outcome (how many patients would be needed in each arm)
• there were no confidence intervals quoted on the P values.

I should note that this was a phase 2 study so one wouldn’t really expect them to address most of the above points.

As with all medical intervention studies, it’s the phase 3 which sorts fact from fiction(from ncbi):

Phase II clinical studies represent a critical point in determining drug costs, and phase II is a poor predictor of drug success: >30% of drugs entering phase II studies fail to progress, and >58% of drugs go on to fail in phase III.

Thats not to say this won’t be successful either clinically or financially, just that needs to be careful to build “a probabilistic model of the potential outcomes” - to quote a certain Kiwi investor.