In April, a new journal called Applied Mobilities was launched by Taylor and Francis. Given physiotherapy's interest in anything to do with mobility, you might be mistaken for believing that this was a new journal for us. But it isn't. Well it could be, but physiotherapy is currently only interested in quite specific kinds of mobility - the kind involving the biomechanical body - and isn't particularly interested in material semiotics or the day-to-day movements of Chinese migrant women in Sydney. So the journal joins the ranks of other journals like Body and Society, Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences and Medical Humanities as journals that physiotherapists probably ought to … [Read more...] about Is it time for new critical physiotherapy journal?
Interesting outcome
A quick quiz... What do these outcomes measures have in common? The Step Activity Monitor (SAM) Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI) Fatigue Scale The Postural Assessment Scale for Stroke (PASS) And the Hierarchical Assessment of Balance and Mobility (HABAM) Yes, they do all suffer from the same urge to give every outcomes measure an acronyms. (Although it has to be said that the people who invented the Physiotherapy Functional Mobility Profile Questionnaire (PFMP-Q), had no desire to give their outcome measure a memorable name or acronym). But that's not the right answer. The answer is that they are all outcome measures developed in the last 20 years that are widely … [Read more...] about Interesting outcome
Ways to be critical
I'm sometimes asked what the 'Critical' in Critical Physiotherapy Network refers to. It's a good question, because there's more than one meaning for the term, and we are using it in quite a specific sense here. So here are some different meanings for the word critical, only some of which apply to the Network. Critical in the sense of expressing disapproval or negative judgement, as in; 'I don't like that' or 'I think that's wrong' Critical as in 'critical review'; the sort of thing that a lot of students are trained to do these days; to review a body of literature and say whether it's any good or not Critical care: that required by acutely ill people Critical in the sense … [Read more...] about Ways to be critical
Does physiotherapy’s hidden curriculum exclude men?
A recent article in The Conversation explored how training to be a surgeon subtly marginalised women and promoted the idea that surgery was a man's world (link). Surgical training was described as 'powerful, visible, gendered and discriminatory'. Over the last few months I've been writing and thinking a lot about the gendering of physiotherapy. Much of that has revolved around the ways that women masseuses in World War I first came into contact with young male bodies, and the brutal ways they went about rehabilitating them. (The image above is from a classic series of postcards that depicted the dominating and and fearful WWI masseuse - see Carden-Coyne, 2008). Anders Ottosson's … [Read more...] about Does physiotherapy’s hidden curriculum exclude men?
Shitty robots
A few blogposts ago, I wrote asking why it was that things had to work (link)? Why is it physiotherapists are obsessed with things working. Well one of our Critical Physiotherapy comrades read the post and pointed me to the beautiful, poetic and entirely useless work of Simone Giertz and her Shitty Robots. And then would you believe it, but two days later Simone is being interviewed on our local radio station (listen here). Simone builds robots that don't work. Or rather they work, but don't do anything useful. They are the antithesis of all of the supposedly 'useful' (and frankly poe-faced and self-righteous) mechanical contraptions now making their way into physiotherapy … [Read more...] about Shitty robots
Can we establish a global paradigm for physiotherapy treatments?
Today's blogpost comes from CPN member Hazel Horobin. Hazel is a Senior Lecturer in Physiotherapy at the University of Brighton in the UK. I warmly welcome Jonathon Kruger as the new CEO of the WCPT. What an amazing job he steps into, representing physiotherapy/physical therapy globally. I guess though that one of the issues he will struggle with most is the national variations in professional recognition. This concept is frequently encapsulated as professional ‘autonomy’ and I would like to explore this. Our treatments are frequently thought of as being the consequence of reasoning processes (Norman, 2005). However, sociologists talk about issues of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ when … [Read more...] about Can we establish a global paradigm for physiotherapy treatments?
There was always more than one body in physiotherapy
When physiotherapists refer to the body, they're often referring to the body that's defined by biomedicine: organised into systems; physical; patho-anatomical; cellular; the place where injury and illness can be located; biological. But this only accounts for a small group of 'bodies' that we encounter in practice every day. A recent conference announcement highlighted some of the bodies that Victorians were interested in, and many of these still interest physiotherapists: busy bodies body markings disabled bodies prosthetics bodies behaving badly the body as spectacle fragmented bodies queer bodies raced bodies disciplined bodies animal bodies … [Read more...] about There was always more than one body in physiotherapy