A Systematic Review of the Efficacy of Kinesiology Taping in Enhancing Range of Motion and Reducing Pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Kinesiology taping, or KT, is a popular therapeutic technique among clinicians worldwide for managing musculoskeletal pain and impairment. Despite the widespread application in sports medicine, physiotherapy, and rehabilitation, a clear consensus on its efficacy for the improvement of ROM and pain reduction has not yet been achieved due to conflicting results presented in the literature. Aim: The aim of this systematic review is to critically appraise and synthesize current evidence from RCTs regarding KT's effectiveness in improving ROM and relieving pain among patients with various musculoskeletal conditions. Methods: A systematic search of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, CINAHL, and PEDro databases was carried out for RCTs published between 2013 and 2024. The studies included in this review investigated the effects of KT on ROM and/or pain compared to sham taping, other interventions, or no intervention. Results: KT is associated with a small, statistically significant short-term pain reduction in conditions such as shoulder impingement and low back pain, although the clinical relevance of these findings is often doubtful. The evidence on ROM is more conflicting, with some studies demonstrating small improvements in selected populations (for example, post-stroke and ankle sprains) while others have shown no benefit compared to sham tape or active modalities. A placebo effect would seem to be an important contributor to perceived benefits. Conclusion: KT may be regarded, depending on the context, as a complementary modality for transient pain relief and gains in ROM. The magnitude of effect is usually small, and it may not be superior to other established interventions. Future high-quality research should focus on the standardization of application protocols, identification of optimal patient subgroups, and further elucidation of specific neurophysiological and biomechanical mechanisms of action.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.056 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".