Clinical heterogeneity was a common problem in Cochrane reviews of physiotherapy and occupational therapy

Limitation to a few outcome measures and explicit procedures for the categorization of interventions might increase the transparency and reproducibility of systematic reviews on physiotherapy and occupational therapy. Qualitative data synthesis is not often applied, although it is a useful tool to summarize results if a quantitative synthesis is not appropriate. International consensus on a method for qualitative synthesis is clearly needed.