An increasingly common surgical procedure for repairing spinal fractures might not be all it's cracked up to be--in fact, the surgery had the same effect on patient's pain as a placebo, twostudies report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The technique, called vertebroplasty, involves injecting medical cement into a fractured spine bone to strengthen it. More than 38,000 such procedures are done in the United States every year and the number has been [increasing] rapidly, nearly doubling from 2001 to 2005