PHYSIOTHERAPY 2.0: NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INNOVATION
Tobba T Sudmann, PT, PhD, Professor in Public Health, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway.
The first part of the title paraphrases Web 2.0, which refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability for end users. The eight physio sci-fi stories can be appreciated as fragments of Physiotherapy 2.0, where users are understood to be physiotherapists, co-workers, patients, citizens, or other stakeholders, who take initiative and responsibility for launching physiotherapy 2.0.
A commentary always entails a reception of the texts. My reception appropriates a reading in line with modern day reception theories, where texts are produced, distributed, read, interpretated, paraphrased, re-phrased and re-distributed in a multitude of ways on a multitude of platforms (Jensen, 2019). Furthermore, texts are always read, negotiated, and contested within a specific context, including the differences in knowledge, experience and interests the readers bring along. The eight stories prompted my curiosity and respect, and gratitude is due for the bravery exhibited by academic staff and students for making this possible. I refrain from commenting on each of the stories, but rather invite readers of my text to create their own reception of the eight stories, the accompanying paper from the staff (Maric et al.), and the four commentaries.
The second part of the title is an idiom which captures the common denominator across the stories; there are pressing issues, needs and wants related to health in the future which call for innovative responses from physiotherapists of today and of tomorrow. Physiotherapists’ toolboxes are equipped to motivate and support our patients in building and using their change contingency. The tools most used are movement and interaction, to create bodily changes to be able to meet an unknown future. Through movement and interaction physiotherapists can affect the body from cell to society, i.e., facilitate micro plasticity, flexibility and changeability for movement and social participation – from cell to society.
The sci-fi stories unanimously show that physiotherapy theory and practice most often stand as an individual approach to individual problems, which the student-authors find distressing. Their imagined future health needs re-route physiotherapy towards contextual and global issues, and an understanding of health as much more than a personal biological asset. Health problems are often produced at a societal and political level, e.g., the global unequal distribution of burdens (e.g., basics like clean water, enough food, and safe shelters), unequal access to health services. The sci-fi stories are more than real in their acknowledgement and anticipation of a need for a broader knowledgebase in physiotherapy, and a need for new approaches to health encounters and health measures at an individual, group and societal level.
From my point of view, a privileged vantage point in the Northern hemisphere, an answer to the student-authors calls, is to encourage physiotherapy practitioners, educators, and researchers to learn from inter alia occupational therapists, social workers, political scientists, and philosophers, who have engaged themselves in issues related to health justice and environmental activism. Occupational therapists, social workers, and human and veterinary doctors, increasingly engage themselves in collective action to better the lives of all things living, including the health of our planet. Social workers call for environmental justice (Dominelli, 2014), and occupational therapists call for occupational justice (Bailliard et al., 2020). Social injustice and inequality in health are two sides of the same coin, as is environmental awareness and human rights. Health justice increasingly engages a broad scholarship, not at least when it comes to acknowledge and act upon the understanding of how all things living are interdependent (Mackenbach, 2021; Venkatapuram, 2013). Tarazona et al. (2020) sums up the argument as “One health, one welfare, one biology”.
The physiotherapy profession has self-administered a restraint on societal engagement, and cherished “neutrality” as a euphemism for political ignorance. The students are champs at the bit – demonstrating their impatience for a physiotherapy 2.0 with a social conscience.
Physiotherapy 2.0 will need a refurbished tool-box, and the Johari window might fit as a generic tool (Oliver & Duncan, 2019). The model is a simple matrix of familiar and unfamiliar knowledge; what is known to someone can be shared and translated by asking and listening, whereas the unknown can be explored together.
The collected stories are written by the students as individuals. I would love to see the ideas of future thinking, creativity and bravery unfold further, and would suggest that the University encouraged the students to work collectively, material, and practical with their future projects. Design thinking (Carlsen et al., 2012) and applied drama (Nicholson, 2005) might serve as inspiration, as do different well known approaches to Utopia (Nielsen & Nielsen, 2016) and future workshops (Jungk & Müllert, 1987). The Johari window can be used as part or parcel of future workshops (Alminde & Warming, 2020), were ideas, performances, and unbridled creativity and ingenuity can unfold. Playing with fiction is playing with the future, and in my view some activity and doing is mandatory for future physiotherapist. Doing something is what we do.
Tomorrows experts are probably not known to us to day, which necessitates an open attitude towards identification of available roles for physiotherapists (Pau & Hall, 2021) . Either way, future health challenges are in emergent need of social innovation and collective action for change (Moulaert, 2013). A first foot forward could be to turn our gazes and interventions from an anthropocentric towards an eco-centric approach to health and social challenges, as shown in Ramsay & Boddy’s model below (Ramsay & Boddy, 2017).
My last two cents are: “Think global, act local – Go Glocal!” (Sudmann & Breivik, 2018). Everyone can do something that make a small difference in someone else’s life or living conditions, not least present-day and future physiotherapists.
REFERENCES
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Bailliard, A. L., Dallman, A. R., Carroll, A., Lee, B. D., & Szendrey, S. (2020). Doing occupational justice: A central dimension of everyday occupational therapy practice. Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 87(2), 144-152. doi:10.1177/0008417419898930
Carlsen, A., Clegg, S., & Gjersvik, R. (2012). Idea work: Lessons of the extraordinary in everyday creativity. Oslo: Cappelen Damm.
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Tarazona, A. M., Ceballos, M. C., & Broom, D. M. (2020). Human relationships with domestic and other animals: one health, one welfare, one biology. Animals, 10(1), 43. doi:10.3390/ani10010043
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