Marking the launch of the new edition of the Journal of Humanities and Rehabilitation – itself a notable and new creative venture – this post is about creativity.
Physiotherapy ought to be a vehicle for all sorts of creative expression, given that so much of what we do is about bodies and movement.
I know many physiotherapists who love dance, martial arts, singing, performance art and other forms of physical expression, as well as creative thinkers, ideas people, artists, musicians, poets, photographers and writers of fiction. But there are few creative outlets for their work within physiotherapy itself. It seems there is physiotherapy, and creative expression is something that sits outside.
Why is this? Why is it that we have consistently undervalued creative expression, in favour of rigorous scientific objectivity? And at what point did we decide that we could have one but not the other?
As our practice becomes increasingly humanistic and social, we need to find new ways to express the full breadth of our work, and one way would be through the creative arts.
WCPT has run an ‘Arts and Health‘ competition for a number of years, but these works often express safely literal renderings of traditional physiotherapy motifs, where people regain movement and overcome adversity. But there is much more that physiotherapists can say and do with the arts than this.
Physiotherapy might not only find new ways of expressing itself through creative arts, it might also find new ways of ‘being’ that challenge convention and lead the way in the next phase of the profession’s maturation.
Thank you for including the link to the Journal of humanities in Rehabilitation. Some fascinating reads. Creativity and the arts are rehab as well as a preventive strategy and for extending the languages of communication. As well as a PT I am an audio describer for people with low vision and blindness. The experience of describing the visual and performance arts has extended my capacity to communicate effectively.
I couldn’t find a suitable Journal to publish my honors paper, “Dance as a Promotional Tool for Motor Development in Children Between 7-9.” back in 2000. I ended up publishing in the only physiotherapist Journal in Colombia at that time, The Journal of the Colombian Physiotherapy Association 2003. Thank you so much for sharing. I will immerse myself in this new rehabilitation dialogues and spread the word with friends, colleagues and likeminded people.
Thanks David. I’m also interested in the integration of creative expression as part of undergraduate physiotherapy education. We spend so much time in the curriculum discussing evidence-based practice, and (almost) none talking about the physio as a creative being. Ken Robinson has a TED Talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en) where he has this great idea about how we “educate” the creativity out of our children.
We do the same thing in phsyiotherapy education; we emphasise the idea that if you can’t assign a number to it, it didn’t happen. And yet, when I’ve asked students to express themselves in more creative contexts (art, poetry, music, etc.) I get the most amazing responses. I also get the students who are anxious with the idea that they are going to be marked on “being creative”, which they almost all say they are not.
As a profession, is there a danger in remaining static and avoiding change? And then if we decide that chanage is important, can we really change without strongly integrating creative expression in our education and professional practice? Are physios creative beings? And if they are, do they think of themselves as such?