Well, I was only going to post all the minutiae if there was any interest...

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/295/3/285.pdf

The two groups are as follows:

Assigned to "Watchful Waiting":

• 336 patients
• 17 had problems after 2 years

Assigned to surgery:

• 317 patients
• 7 had problems after 2 years

Some patients crossed between the two groups, but this does not matter, as they were testing the effects of the initial assignment.

They report p = 0.52, but they also give a 95% confidence interval for the difference in risk, which just barely contains zero; which is a dead giveaway that p should be around 0.05, right? Anyway, doing a chi-squared test on the above numbers, I got p = 0.053.

The relevant bit is at the top of page 289 (page 6 of the PDF). Also relevant are the Results section of the abstract, and Figures 1 and 2. Essentially the entire problem is this statement:

At 2 years, intention-to-treat analyses showed that pain interfering with activities developed in similar proportions in both groups (5.1% for watchful waiting vs 2.2% for surgical repair; difference 2.86%; 95% confidence interval, -0.04% to 5.77%; P=.52)