PEDro – An important physiotherapy evidence resource.

PEDro is physiotherapy Evidence Based Database. It is created to bring physiotherapy evidences free to use for physiotherapists all round the world. It archives more than 31 thousand interventional studies (clinical trials), summary of evidences (Systematic reviews) and clinical practice guidelines. It is easier as physiotherapists to browse through one database PEDro for updating themselves, rather than searching for evidences in many other databases such as pubmed/ medline, scopus, EMBASE, CINAHL and many more.
Other than the benefit of finding all physiotherapy related resources under one forum, PEDro also grades or appraises the clinical trials (interventional studies) using PEDro scale, which highlights the quality of the studies which guides us to either to believe or not believe the published study. Using wrong evidences or biased evidences in your clinical practice can do more harm than good. Quality grading is a unique feature of PEDro and is absent in all other databases. Quality grading is a difficult critical appraisal skill, which PEDro makes easier for clinicians so that they know about quality of the study without having meticulous knowledge on research methods.
One example is, if you are seeking for evidences for management for lateral epicondyalgia (tennis elbow/ lateral epicondylitis), instead of browsing through 10 databases or google scholar (which gives many other non- indexed and irrelevant studies), you may surf PEDro simple search in PEDro website. PEDro will list out all the physiotherapy related interventions for lateral epicondyalgia. On the list of studies pertaining to lateral epicondylalgia, you will see systematic reviews, clinical practice guidelines and clinical trials pertaining to your search term. If you are interested in exploring the effectiveness of low-energy shock wave treatment for lateral epicondylitis, and you find this trial which rates 9/10. You can trust the conclusion of this trial as it is of very high quality. Whereas if you find this trial, which rates 6/10 in PEDro scale for use of effectiveness of myofasical release in tennis elbow, you need to be careful with the results as the assessor was not blinded in this study which may confound the final results. Finally, you cannot trust the results of this trial which scores only 3/10 and is highly biased.