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Postoperative physiotherapy31312Table 7: Risk of bias assessment of randomized controlled trials using the Cochrane Collaboration’s Tool.Study (year)Random sequence generationAllocation concealmentBlinding of outcome assessmentIncomplete outcome dataSelective reportingOtherCapan et al. (2017) (14) + + ? + + +Abbreviations: +, low risk of bias; –, high risk of bias; ?, unclear risk of bias.Study ResultsAustin and Shupe(12) treated a total of 50 patients, who were divided into a treatment group of 24 patients and a control group of 26 patients. The surgical treatment varied from arthroscopy to arthroplasty and, in 4 cases, placement of a disk implant. Although the control group did not receive a specific schedule for physical therapy, the treatment group underwent 3 different phases of physiotherapy, each of which only started if the preset requirements in ROM, pain relief, and decrease in swelling were met. These different phases are further elaborated on in Table 3. With 20 of 24 patients in the treatment group having a ROM of at least 40 mm at 8 weeks after surgery compared to 3 of 26 for the control group, they concluded that the importance of physical therapy after surgery was obvious, resulting in a significantly larger than predicted increase in MMO (P = .0004) and a significantly larger MMO (P = .03). However, no significant difference in increase of lateral movement was found between groups (P = 0.13). Three patients in the control group and 6 patients in the treatment group underwent unilateral or bilateral arthroscopy rather than open surgery, which in turn could lead to a bias in the mentioned results. However, because of the paucity of data available, the authors chose not to exclude this article from the results.Nikolas de Meurechy NW.indd 313 05-06-2024 10:15