We've been planning to run a free online course on thinking critically about physiotherapy for some years, but now we are happy to announce that it has finally come to fruition. A team of CPN members have been thinking about the kind of course that we would want for months now, and we have taken our time to try to develop a program that we think you will find interesting and exciting. The course is grounded in practical, everyday physiotherapy challenges, but uses the experience of physiotherapists who have a deep knowledge of theory and philosophy to expand on the ways we currently think about these situations and issues. Is autonomy really a good thing for physiotherapists? … [Read more...] about The first ever Free Critical Physiotherapy Online Course is coming
Taking off your ‘physio’ head
A couple of friends sent me things that they thought I'd enjoy this week, and both of them are worth sharing. The first was a quote from a student who is halfway through their final year of study and in the middle of a long block of clinical practice. They were reflecting on their work. They wrote: “Sometimes I feel it can be hard to take off my "physio thinking hat" and put on my human thinking hat.” We should perhaps have a moment's silence just to reflect on that. The second was a paper from 2004 that highlighted the virtues of looking at the obvious and familiar in new ways. The paper is titled Culture on the ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet (link to the full … [Read more...] about Taking off your ‘physio’ head
The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
It's often tempting to think that it's the big changes, the grand gestures, that do the most damage to a profession, but it's really the small acts of violence that really do the damage. The daily drip, drip, drip, that slowly erodes the foundations until, one day, the house falls down. 'Threats to democracy come one dollar at a time', goes the old American political aphorism, and so it is with professions like physiotherapy, which can suffer death from a thousand cuts if they are too distracted to notice. Foucault would say that the most powerful and dangerous ideas are those that arrive under the cover of common sense, where it seems almost impossible to dispute the reason and logic … [Read more...] about The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
