Abstract:

BACKGROUND: The combination of evidence-based medicine and rehabilitation medicine is increasingly close, and provides the evidence-based principle, method and reference particularly for the clinical practice of rehabilitation medicine.
OBJECTIVE: To systematically review the research situation of systematic evaluation/meta-analysis of rehabilitation medicine in China.
METHODS: Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (1979/2009), VIP database (1989/2009), Wanfang (1998/2009) and CBMdisc (1978/2009) database were overall retrieved by the first author using computer. Each database was retrieved twice. The first research terms were “systematic review”, “systematic evaluation”, and “meta-analysis”, and language was limited to Chinese. The second research terms were “rehabilitation therapy”, “physiotherapy” (physical therapy), “occupational therapy”，“speech therapy” , and “music therapy”, and language was limited to Chinese and English. From the literature, evaluation methods, intervention targets, year of publication, literature sources, and trials were descriptively analyzed.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Since 2002, a total of 59 articles were retrieved. After screening, 10 articles met the inclusion criteria, including physical therapy/physiotherapy (6 articles), music therapy (3 articles), comprehensive rehabilitation therapy    (1 article), and evaluation of disease (8 kinds, most of them are nervous system disease). The number of articles increased year by year. Most contents were about physiotherapy. Clinical rehabilitation therapy was assessed from multiple perspectives. The systematic evaluation/meta-analysis of rehabilitation medicine in China is still in the initial stage. We look forward to explore a new style of methodology to be in conformity with the characteristics of rehabilitation medicine, based on the principle and methods of evidence-based medicine in the future research.