The bioethics discipline has had a significant advancement in the last decades. Latin America, and mainly Brazil, have followed this world trend, showing a good number of publications by health care professionals. This study aims at verifying how the themes of bioethics and ethics were incorporated into practice and research in the physical therapy field. This systematic literature review has drawn on MedLine/PubMed, SciELO, ProQuest, Scopus, Lilacs, Biblioteca Virtual de Saúde and Scholar Google databases, on physical therapy journal websites, also resorting to a Brazilian bioethics bibliography published in 2002 and to contact with authors, searching for articles published from 2000 on that addressed ethics and bioethics issues related to physical therapy. Books, comments on and/or book reviews, articles in non-indexed journals as well as texts having a commercial or advertising focus were excluded. Twenty-three articles, two editorials and a magazine section have been selected. Results show that the evolution of bioethics research in physical therapy is ever-increasing in the international scenario, but there is a lack of such studies in the national scope. This points to the urgent need to include this theme in physical therapists education and debate, in order to contribute to the development of professional identity.
Bioethics; Ethics; Physical therapy; Review literature as topic
