Evidence-based practice includes the integration of patient values and focuses on the most appropriate course of action through clinical expertise and best available research. In order to produce the best research a clinician must form an adequate question and search strategy, critique the research found, critically interpret the findings, and apply them to each patient scenario. For instance, a clinical scenario could be, “Gerald is a 72 year-old male with stage III Parkinson’s disease (PD) and is referred to a physical therapist by his physician. Upon arrival, his main concern is his mobility through the community primarily due to his new balance deficits. The patient enjoys …show more content…
This lead to the desire to further pursue research in the current ways to treat balance issue in this patient population, which lead our group to discovering many different methods such as levodopa, COMT inhibitors, electrical stimulation, or LSVT BIG program. However, one method stuck out to our group, which was the use of VR balance therapy. VR can be defined as the use of a computer constructed environment that a person can interact with in some way. An example of this could be the use of a Nintendo Wii balance board or handheld device, Xbox Kinect, or a projected environment on a …show more content…
The major strength of the article was the authors were very thorough in conducting follow ups with patients every year for eight years. There were more weaknesses that were able to be identified than strengths. The first major weakness of this article was that the sample size was very small (n=23), making the findings limited in generalizability. A second weakness present was the lack of thorough explanation of measurements. There was no specification about any blinding being done, who was conducting the tests on the patients, or how the tests were conducted. Another weakness was that the research design was a non-experimental study, which ranks as a lower level of evidence. The final weakness, is that the statistical analysis was lacking explanation. The authors ran statistical analyses on their outcomes of tests run using a “logistic regression” equation that was not specified any further. Overall, the article proved to be a weaker piece of evidence, but still raised awareness of a potential harm in having PD patients use VR as an intervention of