Abstract
Interest has been accelerating in the promotion of interdisciplinary research to ensure an integrative approach to health science. Perhaps no other area of health research more obviously benefits from interdisciplinary research than rehabilitation. Besides biomedical and clinical practice-oriented research, interdisciplinary research is needed for rehabilitation management within health systems. After clarifying the notion of interdisciplinarity in general, this chapter argues that rehabilitation—understood as a health strategy that primarily aims to optimize human functioning across (simple to complex) domains of action—is ideally suited to the interdisciplinary research paradigm. This is partly because rehabilitation practice fundamentally concerns ‘functioning’ (as understood in the WHO’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health).
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Cochrane formally approved the establishment of the Cochrane Rehabilitation Field on 22 October 2016 (see https://rehabilitation.cochrane.org/about-us).
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Bickenbach, J., Danermark, B. (2019). Interdisciplinarity and Rehabilitation Research. In: Harsløf, I., Poulsen, I., Larsen, K. (eds) New Dynamics of Disability and Rehabilitation. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7346-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7346-6_13
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