Physiotherapists are very interested in fitness, leisure and sport, but they rarely discuss the history of these ideas, or the place of physical therapies (massage, manipulations and mobilisations, remedial exercise, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy etc.) in the promotion of the health of the population. There are a number of reasons why I think we should pay more attention to this specific history. Firstly, it's one of the few areas where physical therapies have made a genuine contribution to the health of the population. I don't mean the health of individual patients that, taken together, amounts to the health of the population, but rather an approach applied to the population as a whole - … [Read more...] about Strong and modern – physiotherapy and physical culture
Metaphors of rhizomatic thinking
Earlier this week Mike Stewart (@knowpainmike) ran a @physiotalk Tweet Chat on the hidden influence of metaphor in physiotherapy (see here, and Mike's excellent review of the Tweet Chat here). It inspired me to think about the role metaphors play in learning. If you follow this blog regularly, you will have heard the name Gilles Deleuze. If you haven't heard this name though, it might pay to do a bit of web trawling, because some of his ideas are pretty astonishing. There have been some startling thinkers emerge from Europe over the last 100 years - Heidegger, Foucault, Sartre, Derrida, Adorno, etc. - but, for pure inventiveness, Deleuze takes the biscuit. (One tip though...I would not … [Read more...] about Metaphors of rhizomatic thinking
Do you want our physiotherapy degree? No thanks, I made my own.
There was a story going around recently about Phil Lord's response when asked why his Lego movie had been snubbed for an Oscar. His reply was priceless. "It's okay" he said. "Made my own" (link). One of the things that's so fantastic about this response is the way Lord snubs the authority of the Oscar Nomination's Committee and says "I don't need your validation to know I've made a movie that's been a popular success, and I've got my own gong to prove it." When people make this kind of statement it says some interesting things about our changing attitudes towards authority. It seems to me, people these days are much less dependent on the validation, approval and sanction of authority … [Read more...] about Do you want our physiotherapy degree? No thanks, I made my own.