Methodological quality of a systematic review on physical therapy for temporomandibular disorders: influence of hand search and quality scales—reply to a letter to the author

Excerpt

I like the appreciation of Palys, Berger and Alperson for our efforts comparing and contrasting four quality assessment lists for evaluating trial quality. We stated that quality assessment is complex and can be done by various methods. In reality there are a lot of other lists, including the Chalmers list—mentioned by Palys—to evaluate trial quality. However, in our study, the choice for the Delphi, Jadad, and Megens and Harris quality assessment lists were made because they were often used in the field of PT and the risk of bias list is recommended by the Cochrane Collaboration. One of the aims in our study was to analyse the effect of four (of many other) different lists on the quality assessment of RCTs regarding PT for TMD and therefore we compared the overall quality scores. Since the different lists included different items, we were interested in the observed differences. In contrast to Paly’s interpretation, we never asked ourselves which one was the best. …