[Therapeutic climbing--barely explored but widely used].

BACKGROUND: Therapeutic climbing had been used successfully as an intervention in orthopedic-traumatologic, neurologic, psychomotoric and congenital or chronic diseases. The aim of this abstract is to give an overview of the existing literature on this new form of therapy. This could also aid in assessing the methodology and work out future research directions.
MATERIAL AND METHODS: National and international databases within the medical field (Evidence Based Medicine Reviews, PubMed …) have been searched for German and English articles that dealt with climbing in a therapeutic context.
RESULTS: Only a limited amount of scientific investigations regarding the effects of therapeutic climbing were found. Evidence for the effectiveness of this form of climbing was only found in the field of orthopedics. Other published results were field reports or individual case studies which did not make any reliable statements/conclusions.
CONCLUSION: Based on the current review, therapeutic climbing cannot be wholly recommended as an interventional method. However, this should not be interpreted as a refusal to use therapeutic climbing as an intervention. The use of systematic analysis in studying the general effects of climbing movements as well as comparisons to classical interventional methods is necessary. Further approaches to this research study will be given. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.