Clinical library
Clinical Library
Resources for practising physiotherapists and rehabilitation professionals: outcome measures, electrophysical agents, clinical reasoning and evidence summaries. Written to be used in clinic, and honest about what the evidence does not support.
Three sections are open and 26 resources are published, carrying 140 distinct primary sources between them. The rest of the list further down is what is planned, not what exists — and it carries no links, because a page that is not written should not look like a page that is.
If you want clinical depth on a condition rather than an instrument or a machine, it is in the condition guides: 37 of them, each with a named author and reviewer, an evidence grade with its reasoning, and a section stating what the evidence does not support.
Published now
Assessment and Outcome Measures
Balance, gait, function, disability and pain instruments — what each measures, the change you can defend in one patient, and where it misleads.
Electrophysical Agents and Modalities
Electrotherapy, interferential, laser, diathermy, cryotherapy and superficial heat — what each demonstrates, at what dose, and where the effect vanishes.
Clinical Reasoning and Red Flags
Screening for referral, red and yellow flags, imaging appropriateness, and when physiotherapy is not the answer.
What a resource here has to carry
The same contract as every clinical page published by the Physiotherapist India Team, and it is checkable rather than asserted:
- A named author and a named reviewer, two different clinicians, qualifications stated. Nobody reviews their own work.
- An evidence grade with its reasoning shown — not a badge, but a section explaining what would have to be true for the grade to be wrong.
- An explicit statement of what the evidence does not support, given equal weight to what it does.
- Working citations to primary sources, with DOI and PMID, verified against the original rather than quoted second-hand.
- A distinction between "tested and negative" and "not tested". An amber badge means nobody looked, not that something failed.
Where a source cannot be verified directly, it is left out and the omission is stated. Several pages here carry exactly such a note, and the Expanded Disability Status Scale page states outright that it does not reproduce thresholds it has not verified against a primary source, even where those thresholds are widely known.
Planned
Not yet written. These entries deliberately carry no links — this list is a commitment, not a menu.
| Section | What it covers | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Assessment and outcome measures | Balance and gait, global function, region-specific disability, pain, and paediatric and neurological classification. | Open 16 published |
| Electrophysical agents | Electrotherapy, interferential, laser, diathermy, cryotherapy and superficial heat, each with its own entry rather than lumped together. | Open 6 published |
| Clinical reasoning and red flags | Screening for referral, red and yellow flags, and when physiotherapy is not the answer. | Open 4 published |
| Ultrasound, TENS, dry needling, traction and shockwave | Each currently covered only inside the electrotherapy overview, and each deserving the same page-length treatment as laser and diathermy. | Planned |
| Differential diagnosis | Neck pain, knee pain, shoulder pain, dizziness, low back pain, foot pain — what else it could be, and what distinguishes them. | Planned |
| Protocols | Post-operative ACL, TKR, THR, rotator cuff repair, early stroke rehabilitation, spinal cord injury, cardiac phases I to III. | Planned |
| Rehabilitation technology | Robotics, virtual reality, body-weight supported treadmill training, EMG biofeedback, and what the evidence supports for each. | Planned |
Why this section is being built slowly
Because the alternative is worse. A clinical library assembled quickly from secondary sources reads authoritative and is not, and the professionals it is written for are precisely the readers most able to tell. Each resource here takes as long as it takes to verify every figure against the paper it came from.
The cost of that is visible on these pages. Sources whose abstracts could not be retrieved were dropped rather than cited from their titles; a threshold that is common knowledge but absent from any paper we had read was removed rather than left in. What remains is smaller than it could have been and every figure in it is traceable.
Related
For clinicians, and how we work
What the Physiotherapist India Team publishes for practising professionals, who reviews it, how corrections are handled, and the commercial interest declared.