What is Physiotherapy Otherwise?

Physiotherapy Otherwise is part of a long project designed to diagnose the profession of physiothearpy.

It is part of a growing body of work in the new field of critical physiotherapy; a field that has been growing in groups like the Critical Physiotherapy Network for nearly a decade now.

The book that preceded it — The End of Physiotherapy — used critical historical research to explore how we had arrived at this point in the profession’s history.

Physiotherapy Otherwise comes at today’s problems from a different direction, drawing on over a century of sociology to explain what the professions are, what’s good about them, and what’s bad.

There are library shelves full of sociologies of medicine and nursing, but almost nothing about physiotherapy.

On one level this is surprising, because, as its very first step, physiotherapy took social practices that dated back to the dawn of humanity, and claimed them for itself.

And physiotherapy’s colonisation of the physical therapies has worked well for millions of patients, therapists, and their allies over the last century.

But now, as everyone now knows, and The End of Physiotherapy explained, times are changing.

The book argues that the answers to the profession’s future won’t be found in more evidence-based studies of ground force reactions, or Cochrane Reviews of treatments for sub-tala instability. Instead, we need to learn to think in entirely new ways.

Physiotherapists have already begun to do this by turning away somewhat from the body-as-machine, embracing more person-centred and psychologically-informed forms of practice. The ‘social’ dimensions of health and illness, though, remain almost entirely invisible.

Physiotherapy Otherwise starts to put that right, by applying sociological concepts and ideas to physiotherapy itself: by taking the thing that physiotherapists think they know best — their own profession — and showing how we can understand in some new, surprising, and even shocking new ways.

By taking the reader from the earliest sociological beliefs about the professions to the present day, Physiotherapy Otherwise is both a primer on sociology and a critical course in a new way to understand physiotherapy.

But all of this work is necessary only so that the book’s conclusions can be understood.

Healthcare, like all other services and industries around the world, is in the midst of a social revolution – a long-fuse, Big Bang, as some have called it.

This is not only COVID, but digital disruption, climate change, years of economic austerity, increasingly co-morbid health problems, and seemingly intractable organisational complexity.

Where we like it or not, we are entering what is now known as a post-professional era.

What will this mean for the future of the profession, our work, our therapies, our alliances, our livelihoods, our clients and communities?

Sociology may not have all of the answers to these questions, but it will give us more clarity than anything that has gone before.

And so, the book will be available to download for free as a pdf and ePub in early January, and cost-price Print-on-Demand versions will also be available.

The book will be free because public education should be publicly available. Plus, it’s in the spirit of the book’s conclusion.

But more on that shortly…