87 An RTT must be grounded in treatment theories for 2 important reasons. First, without a treatment theory, individual treatments will be determined in research, program evaluation, or therapist self-evaluation to be effective or ineffective, but the overall treatment armamentarium will only grow (or shrink!) one treatment at a time, with no understanding of unifying principles underlying their

efficacy.3 and 18 Second, a treatment selleck compound can, in principle, be defined by an infinitely large set of attributes, including the location where the treatment is conducted, the time of day at which it occurs, the sex of the therapist delivering it, and so on. A treatment theory, rightly or wrongly, constrains the attributes that define

the treatment to those that are hypothesized to be its active ingredients.3 Articulating the treatment theory behind a treatment www.selleckchem.com/products/AZD2281(Olaparib).html or a group of treatments calls attention to those active ingredients and minimizes the number of attributes required to specify the treatment and, hence, locate it in a taxonomy. The ICF provides a useful overarching theory to help organize the RTT by characterizing enablement and disablement at several conceptual levels (Body Structures and Functions, Activities, and Participation) and proposing that all of these are affected by both Personal Factors and Environmental

DNA Damage inhibitor Factors.58 This implies that rehabilitation interventions can also be focused at multiple levels.28 Traditional biomedical treatments target Body (organ) Structure and Function in an attempt to enhance the individual’s functional capacity (eg, improve cardiac output to enhance mobility). Medical rehabilitation also delivers many treatments at this level (eg, strengthening exercises to enhance mobility). Rehabilitation also provides treatments intended to enhance the ICF Activity level, in which underlying organ function may not be affected, but task performance is improved (eg, provision of mobility aids). Participation is also often a target of rehabilitation efforts, most typically by combining a heterogeneous set of treatment services (eg, a vocational rehabilitation program) to enhance employment outcomes. Some rehabilitation services may also manipulate environmental factors (eg, changes in kitchen layout to promote greater independence) or personal factors (eg, self-efficacy training to increase engagement with activity-promoting interventions). Additional theoretical frameworks, beyond the ICF, will need to be brought to bear on an RTT. As has been argued previously, the ICF is (or more properly, implies) a theory or multiple theories of enablement/disablement, but it is not a theory of rehabilitation.