Annotated Bibliography
Introduction
This annotated bibliography is based upon three journal articles, all of which address the question, is hydrotherapy as effective as land based exercise for lower limb conditions? Hydrotherapy, water based exercise performed in a heated pool and will be analysed to determine whether it is an appropriate and beneficial type of physical therapy.
Search Process
Once the topic of hydrotherapy was of interest, keywords such as "effectiveness of hydrotherapy" and "benefits of hydrotherapy for lower limbs" were used in search engines such as Google Scholar and SciVerse. Once articles appeared to be of relevance to the guiding question, the abstracts of each of these articles were read and only those that were easily understood, were interesting and matched closely to the guiding question were selected to be used in the bibliography. After sorting approximately 5 articles that were of relevance to the guiding question, they were then searched for in the VU Library so their full text could be read, as there was only an abstract available when searching through Google Scholar and SciVerse. After reading the 5 articles in full the decision was made on three by how relevant they were to the guiding question and having slight similarities to each other also helped in the decision making process.
The three articles that make up the annotated bibliography each compare hydrotherapy to land based exercise for patients suffering from a certain lower limb condition. The first article compares the two types of therapies for patients with osteoarthritis and whether their strength and physical function will be improved by which type of therapy. The second compares hydrotherapy to land based exercise for patients who have undergone a total knee replacement where as the final article bases its investigation on whether water therapy can be as effective as land based exercise for
Bibliography: Article 1 Foley, A, Halbert, J, Hewitt, T, Crotty, M, 2003 Article 2 Harmor, A, Naylor, J, Crosbie, J, Russell, T, 2009