A couple of months ago I was lucky enough to attend a critical health conference in South Africa. The group that runs the conference is the called International Society of Critical Health Psychology (ISCHP). Similar to our organisation, ISCHP “provides a forum for scrutinising, challenging and questioning what is said and done in the purported pursuit of promoting and improving ‘health’ by health psychologists and others”. ISCHP has a membership of around 800 people and its main activity as a society is to organise bi-annual conferences (the first was in 1999) and to moderate an active email list. The email list provides members with information about relevant employment, publishing, … [Read more...] about Critical conferences and decolonising physiotherapy
History of Physical Therapies in 19th Century New Zealand
Excuse the shameless plug, but I'm giving a public lecture on Thursday night (NZ time) on the History of Physical Therapies in 19th Century New Zealand, and it will be live streamed and recorded, so I thought some of you might be interested in seeing it. New Zealand offers an interesting case study because, in contrast to Europe and North America, where treatments like massage, mobilisation, hydrotherapy, electrotherapy and exercise were some of the most popular 'medical' remedies, physical therapies were almost invisible. New Zealand was a frontier colony for much of the 19th century, and a lot of settlers had little enough food to live on never mind indulging in such … [Read more...] about History of Physical Therapies in 19th Century New Zealand
Physiotherapy and the zone of play
I'm doing a public lecture next week on physical therapies in the 19th century (you will be able to see a live feed or delayed broadcast of it here if you're interested in hearing about it), and the whole project has been fascinating. One thing that occurred to me doing the preparation for the talk was how many images there are of people sitting in mud baths and hot springs. There was never any real proof that these things did anything other than warm you up, but there was a lot of anecdotal evidence that they were used to treat all sorts of diseases, from syphilis to sciatica, asthma to psoriasis. Suffice to say, in 19th century New Zealand, hot pools were a natural phenomenon, … [Read more...] about Physiotherapy and the zone of play