Our esteemed Roger Kerry (@RogerKerry1) asked a great question on Twitter last week. Is a detailed knowledge of anatomy (e.g. muscle structure/innervation; bone form; neural plexi structure; lung structure; etc) necessary to be a good clinician? (Here's a link to the full Twitter conversation). Interestingly, peoples' responses broadly polarised into two binary positions with roughly two-thirds of respondents arguing a qualified "yes", that anatomy was essential, with a third arguing "no". The posted comments also make for interesting reading. But it felt to me that one of the things missing from the debate was a discussion of what anatomy does for physiotherapy, beyond giving us a … [Read more...] about Anatomy and physiotherapy
Meeting the human body
This post is a reblogging of a recent post by Jenny Wickford. Jenny is a Swedish physiotherapist with a special interest in looking at pelvic pain and dysfunction from a functional and movement-based perspective. Jenny's blogsite can be found here. I have had the rare opportunity to spend three courses totaling 22 days exploring the human body through dissection. These courses have, hands down, been some of the most powerful experiences I have had – personally and professionally. They have challenged much of what I have been taught, what I thought I knew. The forms, in their silence, have showed me life in a whole different light. I am a firm believer in the power of touch. Our … [Read more...] about Meeting the human body
New: Anatomy
These 30 Days of September posts are supposed to be provocative. Not the kinds of provocation that comes from empty gestures and tired clichés (hopefully not, at least). But the kind of provocation that contain grains of truth (cliché-related humour). So, fair warning, what I'm about to say may upset some people. But I'm really only trying to articulate what should be reasonably obvious by now to anyone with a mobile device and an Internet connection. So here goes. A day will come soon, when students will no longer need anatomy taught in the traditional way: with endless lectures full of mind-numbing names and abstract mechanics. Students will no longer need to stay up late into … [Read more...] about New: Anatomy
New: Normals
Think about how much time you spent learning about the 'normal' body in physiotherapy school. Think about how much time you spend in clinical practice assessing people to see what's 'abnormal.' And all of those clinical trials that develop sensitive, reliable and valid measures of activity, bodily function, movement and pain; all based on some universal notion of normality. Tests and measures have to assume that there is one universal normal for them to be universal. So, in principal, a score of 13 on the Modified Borg Scale means the same thing in Afghanistan as it does in Alaska, and a BMI of 28 is obese no matter where you live. Physiotherapists learn the principal of … [Read more...] about New: Normals
Touching on something important
In a fantastic comment on my latest blogpost in this mini-series looking at the innate and largely unspoken sensuality of physical therapy, Eric Kruger posted up a video from Youtube which shows Ken Cole and Rajesh Khemraj in a tutorial looking at the SI Joint at a 2014 NAIOMT Annual General Meeting (link to the original post and Youtube video here). In the comment, Eric concentrated on the question of the power asymmetry that exists in therapeutic practice. I wanted to extend this discussion on a little here, so iIf you haven't read it already, I strongly advise looking at it before reading on. Lets take a moment to deconstruct the video Eric posted up a little. Here we have three … [Read more...] about Touching on something important
Radical new graduating competencies for physiotherapists
It was a reasonably modest event at WCPT (but then what isn't compared to the scale of the congress!), and so you'd be forgiven for missing it, but the formal launch of the new Threshold Standards for physiotherapists in Australia and New Zealand could actually be one of the most significant events to have happened in physiotherapy in recent years (to view the standards, click this link: Threshold standards Australia NZ 2015). For the uninitiated, the standards are the culmination of an enormous trans-Tasman project to align the graduating competencies and capabilities of all the schools in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The project was commissioned by the Australian Physiotherapy … [Read more...] about Radical new graduating competencies for physiotherapists
Anatomy – old and new
The human body has fascinated people for as long as we have had recorded history, but never more so than over the last 400 years. Since the Renaissance, artists, performers, and natural philosophers (who would later just be called 'scientists') drew their inspiration from the mysterious inner workings of the body. There's some great recent writing about the history and philosophy of anatomy, including studies of anatomy in Britain from 1700-1900 (MacDonald, 2014), critical analyses of anatomy lectures (Frieson and Roth, 2014), and Andreas Vesalius's public anatomy lessons (Shotwell, 2015). But there are also two new resources on the web that I came across recently that are quite amazing … [Read more...] about Anatomy – old and new