As a physio in the US, I have spent 8 years providing care in the public education system and private schools serving children with developmental delays and their families, 10 years in traditional outpatient care primarily serving patients with neuromusculoskeletal complaints, and I am now about to begin my 7th year in the home health setting mostly serving patients with chronic cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological health complaints. When I started my journey as a fresh/green physio, I recognized that my relationships with the children I was working with was of utmost importance as I tried to motivate 2- and 3-year-olds to engage in (fun!) play that would be … [Read more...] about 30DoS 2018 Day 25 – Keith Waldron

It is almost 40 years since I became an occupational therapist. I was a student in Liverpool and then a clinician, first in a large university teaching hospital in Oxford, then in a regional rehabilitation centre in Saskatchewan, Canada, and subsequently in a rural area of Saskatchewan. After some years in this role I decided to upgrade my education, so returned to the UK, and the University of Southampton, to undertake an MSc in Rehabilitation Studies. It was here that I met the work of critical disability theorists, such as Oliver and Barnes, whose work resonated so strongly with my own experiences of living and working with disabled people that I can recall sitting up in bed, reading … [Read more...] about 30DoS 2018 Day 24 – Karen Whalley Hammell

I’ve never taken things particularly seriously, either academically or living with muscular dystrophy.  Having stumbled into physio—literally, I kept falling over, so they made me go—I started thinking sociologically while in the waiting room.  I found that I could do two things at once, picking apart my personal experience of disability while poking holes in the Serious Science of Physical Therapy.  Why all this goal setting, why all this paperwork?  I had been reading a lot of critical theory, you know, Foucault, Heidegger, and the like, without a place to make sense of it.  Though I had never really thought of myself as a disabled person, as I started going through the disability … [Read more...] about 30DoS 2018 Day 23 – Thomas Abrams