OBJECTIVE: The pathologic scar burn will bring many sequelae to patients, such as dysfunction, influence on visage and so on. Based on the symptoms after burn, major treatments included surgical therapy, pressure therapy, physical agent therapy and tradition Chinese medicine (TCM) therapy, etc, so the rehabilitative treatment of post-burn should be chosen synthetically and coordinately to apply several effective managements. This paper aims to review all sorts of rehabilitation treatments after burn so as to point out the developmental direction for the rehabilitation treatment of post-burn. DATA SOURCES: A computer-based search of the Medline for relevant articles to rehabilitative management of post-burn scar published between January 1989 and May 2005 was performed using key words of 'burn, scar, rehabilitation', with language of the articles limited to English. Meanwhile another research of China Hospital Knowledge Database (CHKD) for such articles published in Chinese language between January 1994 and October 2004 was also conducted with key words of 'burn, scar, rehabilitation'. The studying subjects were not limited. STUDY SELECTION: After primary checkup, the literatures about the trails including treatment and control groups were selected, and then the obvious non-randomized clinical trials were screened. The full text of the rest articles was looked up for the next judgment of randomized controlled trial (RCT). The included articles were those about RCT, no matter whether it was single-blind, double-blind or non-blind. DATA EXTRACTION: Totally 30 literatures about randomized and non-randomized studies on post-burn rehabilitative intervention were collected, of which 15 were in accordance with the inclusion criteria. The excluded 15 literatures included 6 non-randomized clinical trials, 7 repeated studies and 2 outdated studies. DATA SYNTHESIS: There were 1,173 patients in 13 experiments. The efficacy of different rehabilitation management on scar after burn was evaluated. CONCLUSION: The rehabilitative treatment after burn should be the application of the most useful treatments which has been chosen synthetically and coordinately, such as, surgery, pressure therapy, ultrasonic treatment, silicon gel therapy and TCM method so as to reduce the physical, mental and community dysfunction and to improve the quality of life of the patients after burn.

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