Rehabilitation Medicine

In the 1960s, hospital president Feng Chuanhan proposed a physiotherapy room at Peking University People's Hospital. The first room at the Baitasi campus occupied a bungalow of less than 30 m², with two staff, three beds and three simple treatment devices, and fewer than ten visits daily. After the Cultural Revolution, it reopened under specialists including Zhang Shufang. The hospital describes historical treatments such as low-frequency direct-current acetate iontophoresis for degenerative bone and joint disease. In 1991 the service moved to the new Xizhimen outpatient campus and became the rehabilitation medicine department, with ten staff, ten rooms and 400 m². Electrotherapy at low, medium and high frequencies, phototherapy, wax therapy, hydrotherapy and exercise therapy were added, and daily visits rose above 100. The department developed treatment plans for individual, chronic and complex conditions and exchanged knowledge with specialists from other hospitals and from Japan, Italy and the United States. From 2006 rehabilitation physicians and therapists worked in other wards to provide early bedside rehabilitation for bone, joint and spinal disease or trauma, cerebrovascular disease, nerve injury and postoperative patients. Since 2023 the department has focused on orthopedic rehabilitation, with geriatric chronic-disease and hematological rehabilitation, while developing neurological, cardiopulmonary and critical-care rehabilitation.