Paralympic History
On the eve of the Paralympics Games Paris 2024 where more than 4,000 athletes, representing 169 nations, will compete over twelve days for 549 medals across 22 events it is instructing to consider its humble beginnings. At a hospital for war veterans in Stoke Mandeville, located 60 kilometres north of …
Physiotherapy First
The phrase, “Physiotherapy First” could be interpreted as a call-to-action to prioritize physical treatments over pharmacotherapy and surgery. Use of the phrase is likely presumed to reflect the modern physiotherapy profession’s progression into primary care, the growing physiotherapy research base of high value care, and the concomitant confidence accompanying them. …
Interview with a Historian
American Physical Therapist and historian, Beth Linker’s latest book Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America has just been released. We provided a review of the book in a previous post but this time wanted to learn more about the author herself. Beth is unique in the physiotherapy community as a historian and …
A Personal History of Dry Needling
In 1992 when I was studying a post-graduate manual therapy course at Curtin University, Perth, the educational emphasis was primarily on joints and neural tissue, with an early smattering of pain science. Whilst assessing a patient during one clinical session, no tests related to any of the education provided were …
Executive Half Year Report – June 2024
The Executive Committee met on three occasions by Zoom teleconference in the first half of 2024. During this period founding member Rob Jones (United Kingdom) retired and new members Ximena Suärez Bonilla (Mexico/Spain) and Esther-Mary D’Arcy (Ireland) were welcomed. The current Executive Committee membership consists of Glenn Ruscoe, Chair (Australia) …
America’s Slouching Epidemic
In her recently published book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” Beth Linker argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped by a poor-posture epidemic: a widespread social contagion of slumping that could have deleterious effects upon individual health, and the body politic. Posture …
Tell Us About Your Student Days
Every physiotherapist was at some point, a student. Thrust into a steep and never ending learning curve of anatomy, physiology, pathology, and more. We are interested in how student days were different around the world and across time, and are asking for all physiotherapists to share their stories. Please tell …
A Distinctive Style
In September 1940, in the dark days of the Second World War, Denmark was occupied by Germany and Rudie Agersnap was elected chairman of the Danish Massage Association. Restrictions and rationing brought challenges for the profession, with a lack of necessary goods for the masseuses to carry out their work. …
How Australian Chiropractors Transformed World Physiotherapy
Osteopathy was devised in 1870s America by Dr Andrew Taylor Still (1828-1917) and chiropractic some twenty years later by David Daniel Palmer (1845-1913). Both utilised a structural perspective to explain and treat functional disturbances. Over the years, orthodox medicine viewed such practices with disdain. The wide variance in training, lack …
A Profession for Middle Class Women
In 1986 Stephanie Short, a physiotherapist and sociologist, published an article in the Australian Journal of Physiotherapy titled, “Physiotherapy – A feminine profession”. Short argued that the female-dominated professions in health care are not as powerful as the male-dominated medical profession and that the key factor in shaping the discrepancies …