Thus, interventions and their putative “active ingredients” tend to be inadequately described and characterized, even in the relatively few treatment studies that can be found in rehabilitation research literature.7, 8 and 9 As practitioners in a professional, treatment-focused field, we have failed to “disaggregate” the interventions that are part of the package provided to inpatients or outpatients; as a consequence, we do not know the individual

and joint effects of our treatments.10 Keith stated a point over 15 years ago that still rings true: Lack PS341 of treatment specification is the most glaring omission in research on rehabilitation outcomes. The unspoken assumption has been that treatment programs for the same condition are fairly standard, but research on see more practice patterns has shown that such assumptions are unwarranted…lack of identification of the components of treatment has meant we do not know which procedures in rehabilitation are essential to produce improvement, a necessary ingredient in

efficiently instituting alternative treatment methods.11(p1202) Given the current state of the science, we cannot explain well, if at all, why patients in rehabilitation improve and which of the various treatments, in what strength or dosage, for what patient groups, or in what time frame, are effective (cf, Bode et al12). There are at least 2 major reasons for the lack of

progress in this area. One reason is that rehabilitation research is frequently not theory driven. The continuously increasing torrent of research on rehabilitation patients and their outcomes, including sophisticated randomized controlled trials demonstrating the effectiveness of certain treatments, is not likely to significantly advance our knowledge of the mechanisms leading to improvements unless treatments become described by their (hypothesized) Liothyronine Sodium active ingredients, and the investigators offer a theory as to how those ingredients, through a mechanism of action, lead to improvements in those aspects of functioning they aim to improve.13 The other reason, interrelated with the first, is that we lack a standard way of describing rehabilitation interventions across the diverse settings, disciplines, and treatments used in rehabilitation, although proposals for nomenclature standards in more limited areas have been made,14 and 15 or at least asked for.16 and 17 Almost all rehabilitation research is underdeveloped, not only in its theory underpinnings, but also in specifying the information that might be used by others in replicating the investigation, or in testing theory-derived hypotheses.