Ethical and bioethical issues in physical therapy: A systematic scoping review.

The review mixed argumentative writing with surveys and interviews, so the 108 studies are not really comparable to each other. About three-quarters of the material came from North America and Europe, so non-Western ways of framing ethical problems are likely underrepresented. The search terms were fixed in advance by the protocol and did not include words like professionalism or professional development, so studies indexed only under those terms may have been missed. Fifty-eight papers could not be obtained in full text even after repeated attempts, so some relevant work was never assessed. Grey literature was searched with a structured checklist, but the authors say it is not possible to catch everything, and widely used physical therapy ethics textbooks may not be covered. It is a map of the literature. It contains no patient data, no outcome measures and no test of any intervention.

No funding or competing-interest statement appears in the text provided, so it is not possible to say who paid for this work or what the authors declared.

Do not read the themes as proof that ethics courses, ethics committees or reflective practice groups improve care. The review collected and sorted existing writing rather than testing anything, most of the included studies were theory, surveys or interviews, and around three-quarters of the material came from North America and Europe, so the picture is not global.