Metabolic disorder is one of the most obvious pathophysiological characteristics of patients with severe burn or trauma, which leads to high mortality of patients with severe burn or trauma. Metabonomics is a newly developed subject which provides new research concepts and ideas for studying the changes of metabolism in a disease condition. Based on the analysis of group indicators, metabonomic technique not only can systematically study the change rules of metabolites, which helps to further clarify the pathophysiological mechanism of burn or trauma, but also is helpful to find some significant biomarkers with important clinical value so as to provide new insight for the therapy of burn or trauma. This paper reviews the research progress of application of metabonomics in the treatment of severe burn or trauma in recent years.