Mixing one part common sense with each part statistics in planning the design and reporting the results of clinical research in physical therapy.
The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of clinical research to improve the quality of clinical practice in physical therapy. Research is the process of posing an important, answerable question and collecting data to provide a convincing answer. Many of the manuscripts I reviewed for possible publication during the recent several years I was an Associate Editor contained one or more flaws that impaired the credibility of the study being reported. One of the flaws was inadequate identification of the research question and the measurements needed to collect the data that would answer the question; a second was insufficient rounding of the numbers used to convey the results; a third was misapplication of arithmetic operations to nominal or ordinal data; and another was the extrapolation of results from healthy young volunteers to explain why a particular treatment should or should not be effective in treating a pathological condition. I urge that physical therapy researchers learn to conduct indepth, thoughtfully guided studies to define the indicators that can be used to predict when a particular patient will respond favorably to a particular therapeutic intervention. Successful accomplishment of such studies will have a substantial and lasting impact on the efficacy and quality of physical therapy practice.
Department of Physical Therapy, Institute for Rehabilitation and Research, Houston, TX.
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D006801:Humans; D026741:Physical Therapy Modalities; D012107:Research Design; D013223:Statistics as Topic