19 All people who entered the study completed treatment and all completed the follow-up assessments, contributing to unbiased treatment estimates. All methodological see more steps were taken in order to provide the lowest possible risk of bias. However, due to the nature of the study,
it was not possible to blind the therapists and participants, so this could be seen as a limitation of the study. Only one brand of tape was used, which is recommended by the Kinesio Taping Association. Therefore, the authors’ are confident that the best and most up-to-date intervention was provided during this study. Based on the results of this study, for the primary outcomes analysed, it can be concluded that there was no advantage of using the Kinesio Taping to generate convolutions. In clinical practice, it is up to physiotherapists to inform and to discuss with their patients the advantages and disadvantages of the method, taking into account costs as well as patient preferences. The authors of the present study are unaware of any studies of people with low back pain that compare Kinesio Taping versus no intervention Target Selective Inhibitor Library ic50 as the control condition, and it would be worthwhile
to do such a study. Only one randomised trial has compared Kinesio Taping to no treatment, which involved 20 participants with knee pain. The results showed that Kinesio Taping was better than no treatment for the outcomes evaluated. Nevertheless, the quality of this evidence was very Cediranib (AZD2171) low and more studies are needed.33 The present study is limited to the
application of Kinesio Taping alone, which may not reflect the current clinical practice of many therapists. It would be interesting to conduct studies of Kinesio Taping as an adjunct to treatments recommended by clinical practice guidelines12 and 33 for low back pain, such as manual therapy and exercises. Therefore, the present study’s research group has recently started another randomised controlled trial in order to respond to this research question.34 What is already known on this topic: Low back pain is common. Kinesio Tape can be applied to cause convolutions of the underlying skin. The developers of Kinesio Tape claim that these convolutions decrease pressure on mechanoreceptors in the underlying tissues and alter recruitment of underlying muscles, thereby reducing pain. What this study adds: Kinesio Taping over the lumbar erector spinae did not reduce pain or disability in people with chronic non-specific low back pain. There was a small improvement in global perceived effect after four weeks, but this was not sustained to 12 weeks. These results challenge the proposed mechanism of action of Kinesio Taping. Footnote: eAddenda: Table 3 can be found online at doi:10.1016/j.jphys.2014.05.003 Ethics approval: The Universidade Cidade de São Paulo Ethics Research Committee of UNICID (number PP13603502) approved this study. All participants gave written informed consent prior to data collection.