The debate about the app Joint Academy, which was developed by a Malmö-based company, has been carried out in Läkartidningen, where sixteen professors have criticized "an increasingly aggressive commercialized marketing" of the app.
The doctors believe that the company lacks evidence for its claims and is looking to increase sales of its digital treatment.
Two Scanian retired professors of orthopedics at Skåne University Hospital in Lund are driving criticism of the care app, the brothers Urban and Anders Rydholm.
None of them want to be interviewed in SVT Nyheter Skåne.
Urban Rydholm writes in an email that they want to "avoid personal vendettas in news channels".
Notification to the Swedish Consumer Agency
At the center of the battle for the care app is another doctor and senior professor of orthopedics, Leif Dahlberg, who together with his son has developed the app Joint Academy.
The Rydholm brothers have reported the marketing of the app to the Swedish Consumer Agency as misleading.
They write in their report that people who receive treatment for pain around the hip or knee are diagnosed with osteoarthritis through communication via the app but without clinical examination.
“This is contrary to the National Board of Health and Welfare's national guidelines, which require a clinical examination as a basis for the diagnosis of osteoarthritis.
The person seeking help is thus misled into believing that it is only possible to get a diagnosis digitally ", they write in their report.
In an email to SVT Nyheter Skåne, Urban Rydholm calls the Joint Academy "a business of a rarely seen kind".
(Geschäft is a German word that in Swedish is most often used with derogatory meaning, business only to make money. Source: Swedish economics dictionary).
SVT Nyheter Skåne has contacted the company behind the app for a comment.