Practitioners of rehabilitation are often criticised for failing to evaluate their clinical work critically and assembling sound research evidence upon which to base it. The paper by Powell et al (this issue, pp 193–202)¹ describes the results of an extremely ambitious and almost unique interventional study of community based rehabilitation in around 100 patients after moderate or severe traumatic brain injury, following the gold standard methodology of a randomised controlled trial.

At entry to the study, patients were allocated to either active multidisciplinary community rehabilitation, or a single therapist …