Consideration of treatment fidelity to improve manual therapy research

The purpose of this paper was to define treatment fidelity, review its use in health care research and suggest how it may be utilized in manual therapy research to improve the reliability and validity of the literature.

We offer an outline and a table of how manual therapy research may benefit from the concept of treatment fidelity.

While treatment fidelity is a newer concept, and has not been integrated into Physical Therapy or Manual Therapy research, when utilized, it can have positive effects on the reliability and validity of the techniques we evaluate.