Commentary on: Kinesio taping in treatment of chronic non-specific low back pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license. www.medicaljournals.se/jrm COMMENTARY ON: "KINESIO TAPING IN TREATMENT OF CHRONIC NON-SPECIFIC LOW BACK PAIN: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS"We recently read the systematic review by Sheng et al. on the effects of Kinesio Taping in patients with chronic non-specific low back pain (1). Although the research question of this systematic review was similar to those addressed in other reviews (2, 3), the results were completely different. This is the first systematic review to conclude that Kinesio Taping is efficacious for patients with low back pain.A possible reason for this unique finding is that the authors only included trials published between 2012 and 2015 (despite Table I presenting trials published in 2016 and 2017). Also, the authors only included trials published in Chinese or English. Finally, no trials that compared Kinesio Taping with placebo, minimal interventions, or a wait-and-see approach were included in the review. The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions (3) clearly warns of "language bias" (4), as studies published in non-English languages appear to have larger effects on interventions than studies published in English (most of the included trials are from China). In addition, the Cochrane Handbook strongly recommends that authors do not restrict the eligibility criteria based on publication dates. Finally, excluding placebo-controlled trials neglects the gold standard of clinical research. It is a pity that the reviewers did not point out these major fatal flaws, which ended up completely spinning the results.The results of Sheng et al.'s review (1) are highly misleading for the following reasons: Firstly, by using questionable inclusion criteria many trials with very large samples and low risk of bias were excluded (e.g. Added et al. 2016 (5) and Parreira et al. 2014 (6)). Such trials can easily be found in PubMed and Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro), for example. Secondly, the review included only trials that showed results in favour of Kinesio Taping, and ignored trials with negative results (i.e. spinning of results ( 7)). This is evident in both of the forest plots included in the systematic review. The issue of selection bias, due to including only positive trials, is clearly evident in the review. We strongly suggest that the results of this systematic review are interpreted with scepticism, as the positive effects were clearly overestimated. Systematic reviews are considered the "gold standard" for determining the effectiveness of interventions and should be conducted in the most rigorous way possible. In this letter we have summarized the main points that could mislead readers to believe that Kinesio Taping could benefit people with chronic nonspecific low back pain.

Effects of Kinesio Taping on Edema Control in Patients With Musculoskeletal Injuries: A Literature Review

“…Once we looked up the review articles on KT published over the past 5 years through the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE) (accessed via PubMed), a total of 52 studies were identified. Most of 52 studies are on cerebral palsy [13][14][15], low back pain [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], ankle functional performance [24][25][26], knee osteoarthritis (OA) [27][28][29][30][31][32][33], shoulder pain and disability [34][35][36][37][38], breast lymphedema [7,39], rehabilitation after stroke [40][41][42] and so on; however, there are only four studies related to edema [43][44][45][46]. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to review the literature on KT for reducing edema caused by musculoskeletal disorders and investigate whether the use of KT have any effects on controlling edema.…”