Status: Article accepted
Authors: Filip Maric, David A Nicholls
DOI: 10.14426/art/908
Date submitted: 14/05/2019
Date accepted: 12/05/2020
The fundamental role of ontology, epistemology, and ethics is widely recognised across the healthcare professions. Yet what is less known in physiotherapy is how ontology and epistemology potentially undermine the ethical intentions of our theories and practices. In this article, we draw on the work of 20th-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to highlight this problem. Particularly Levinas’s ethical critique of ontology and the associated notion of thematisation enable us to highlight a violence that takes place in the philosophical foundations of physiotherapy. Using the overarching aims of physiotherapy, the theory and practice of diagnosis, and the notion and enforcing of professional identities as examples, we additionally show how this violence consequently pervades physiotherapy theory and practice. By exploring a range of critical and practical implications, we finally show how an application of Levinas’s critique of ontology additionally opens toward an otherwise physiotherapy grounded in a renewed understanding of self, other, and their relation. With this, we hope to highlight the core value and critical need for a deeper engagement with the work of Levinas in relation to all aspects of physiotherapy, and particularly its understanding and implementation of ethics that is so fundamental to its practice and a cornerstone of physiotherapy education.
Read: The fundamental violence of physiotherapy: Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of ontology and its implications for physiotherapy theory and practice
Status: Article accepted
Authors: Jenny Setchell, David A Nicholls, Nicky Wilson, Barbara E Gibson
DOI: 10.3138/ptc.70.4.gee
Date submitted: 05/02/2019
Date accepted: 14/02/2019
In this editorial, we argue that ‘critical’ thinking, research and scholarship are essential to understanding and practising rehabilitation, and yet are under-represented in the existing rehabilitation literature. By using the term critical, we are referring to research and scholarship that draw from social theory to examine pervasive taken-for-granted practices, assumptions, and principles in any field, including health care. Thus, critical work offers opportunities to enact more ethical and socially just rehabilitation practices. In what follows we call for rehabilitation journals to recognise, welcome, seek out and publish submissions in this exciting area of research, and thereby lead the field in promoting a new understanding of rehabilitation’s purpose, goals, practices, and outcomes.
Read: Infusing Rehabilitation with Critical Research and Scholarship: A Call to Action
Status: Article accepted
Authors: Michael Rowe
DOI: 10.14426/art/528
Date submitted: 28/05/2018
Date accepted: 23/08/2019
About 200 years ago the invention of the steam engine triggered a wave of unprecedented development and growth in human social and economic systems, whereby human labour was supplanted by machines. The recent emergence of artificially intelligent machines has seen human cognitive capacity augmented by computational agents that are able to recognise previously hidden patterns within massive data sets. The characteristics of this technological advance are already influencing all aspects of society, creating the conditions for disruption to our social, economic, education, health, legal and moral systems, and which will likely to have a more significant impact on human progress than the steam engine. As AI-based technology becomes increasingly embedded within devices, people and systems, the fundamental nature of clinical practice will evolve, resulting in a healthcare system requiring profound changes to physiotherapy education. Clinicians in the near future will find themselves working with information networks on a scale well beyond the capacity of human beings to grasp, thereby necessitating the use of artificial intelligence to analyse and interpret the complex interactions of data, patients and the newly-constituted care teams that will emerge. This paper describes some of the possible influences of AI-based technologies on physiotherapy practice, and the subsequent ways in which physiotherapy education will need to change in order to graduate professionals who are fit for practice in a 21st century health system.
Read: Artificial intelligence in clinical practice: Implications for physiotherapy education
Status: Article accepted
Authors: Jon Foo, Stephen Maloney
DOI: 10.14426/art/474
Date submitted: 20/03/2018
Date accepted: 15/06/2018
Physiotherapy education cannot occur without resources. A pragmatic approach to education design is required, with explicit consideration for the cost of our teaching and learning practices. In this editorial, we explore the concept of cost-conscious educational design in the context of physiotherapy education.
Read: Embracing a dialogue about cost in physiotherapy education