Ben Cormack wrote a post on Facebook yesterday that touched on an important point about innovation and creativity in physiotherapy. The post read: Therapeutic exercise can often literally suck out all the motivation to do it. It can be so meaningless & monotonous. We exercise because it makes us feel good or we want to look good. We play sport because we enjoy the social engagement or the game. We engage in meaningful activities that use our bodies because we can switch off from the world or they provide fulfilment. We need to tap into the things that inspire people to move rather than just tell them to exercise (link). Notice how in each case Ben argues that we do … [Read more...] about Transforming physiotherapy
Art as therapy
I spent the last two weeks in Norway and Denmark, meeting clinicians, lecturers, researchers and students, and generally talking about The End of the Physiotherapy. I spent quite a bit of time talking about the ways physiotherapy might transform itself to adapt to the future, and one of the ideas we kept coming back to was the importance of 'leaving' the profession. I wrote a little about this idea in a blog post just before I set out for Scandinavia, and the subject kept recurring during my visit. The biggest issue for many people seemed to be not so much the need to change, as much as how to change: how to find new ways of thinking and practicing physiotherapy that kept the best of … [Read more...] about Art as therapy
New physiotherapy – 7 ways to change the world
I read something about critical theory this morning that made me think about a couple of recent posts on the future of physiotherapy. In the piece, the author was taking critical theorists to task for attempting to ‘demystify’ the social world without proposing solutions. People, she argued, want attractive alternatives and a sense that utopia, or at least the hope of a better life, might be possible. This is a powerful argument that I don’t entirely agree with, but it did make me think about Roger Kerry’s recent blogpost ‘Physio will eat itself’, which followed my own question of whether we would disestablish physiotherapy as a profession if it were in the best interests of patients or … [Read more...] about New physiotherapy – 7 ways to change the world
The shrinking world of ideas
I'm doing a talk on Monday to my School on qualitative research, and my big theme is that qualitative research far too much qualitative research is saying far too little. Ideas, theory and philosophy are being squeezed out by an unhealthy concern for research methods. This point is made far more elegantly here which, if I'd had it when I was writing my talk, would have saved me a lot of time. http://chronicle.com/article/Neuroscience-Is-Ruining-the/150141/ … [Read more...] about The shrinking world of ideas