The RMT Education Project is Helping people manage sports injuries with confidence through creative and innovative health education. This blog features post on massage therapy, acupuncture, myofascial release, pain science, cupping, IASTM, sports massage, deep tissue massage. Systematic reviews are used as part of an evidence-based model of care to help identify and evaluate existing research for a specific topic. Conducting a systematic review is a complex process.
This specific type of research requires multiple research experts each with their own specialized background to collaborate and analyze all the existing research available for one specific topic.
Evaluating research involves ranking studies based on their methods. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials sit at the top of the pyramid, followed by randomized control trials and observational studies.
Then the researchers comb through research databases to find studies from around the world carried out on that specific topic. After the search is completed the articles are evaluated based on a predefined inclusion criteria.
Then articles are separated by those that meet the predefined criteria and those that do not meet the predefined criteria. The research articles that meet the predefined criteria are then individually screened for potential biases. There are several ways that biases sneak into research, for massage therapy one of the primary sources of bias is due to therapist and patient blinding this is hard to control for. In addition to evaluating studies for potential biases, researchers are looking for potential harms, and treatment effect size.
