Category: Editorial
Canadians Inspired by History
Worldwide, due in part to the current situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the history of our profession is becoming a hot topic. We can draw inspiration from the beginnings of our profession, and model after early successes in answering the call for hard-working independent-minded health professionals. The beginnings of physiotherapy …
Physiotherapy in a time of pandemic
Landry et al make a good point in their recent editorial connecting the outbreak of infectious diseases with the need for rehabilitation (Landry et al., 2020). They suggest that ‘physiotherapy can mediate the deleterious pulmonary, respiratory, and immobility complications that are commonplace’ after the kinds of widespread infections we are …
Australian Physios Preserving their Past
The following edited excerpts are from the article titled “Preserving our Past: Why physio history matters”. It was published in the Australian Physiotherapy Association’s (APA) InMotion Magazine on 3 February 2020 and describes the current status of physiotherapy history activities throughout Australia. The full article can be accessed here. Throughout …
Learning electrotherapy the hard (wired) way
Most physiotherapists will have memories of learning about electrotherapy. Perhaps you learned from Clayton’s Electrotherapy and Actinotherapyabout sinusoidal currents and short-wave diathermy. And perhaps you still have waking nightmares about induction coils? Or perhaps, if you trained under Enid Gotts at the School of Physiotherapy in Dunedin, New Zealand, you’ll …
Light therapy
Physiotherapy has a long history with light therapy. Throughout much of the 20th century, light therapies were an integral part of the therapists toolkit. And actinotherapy – or the therapeutic use of artificial non-ionising radiations, especially ultraviolet light and infra-red (Beckett 1955, 1) – has formed perhaps the largest part. …
Obituary: Freddy Kaltenborn (1923-2019)
A giant has died, the likes of which we will see no more. He was the right man at the right time. Physical Therapy had not yet become a profession when in the 1950’s Freddy Kaltenborn then of Norway and later of Germany, began his interest in mastering joint manipulation. …
A Heart Stopping Game
Physios are like goal keepers and umpires: you don’t notice the good ones. A shell shocked and broken England cricket team was touring New Zealand in February 1975 for a two match test series. Having just faced the fearsome pace attack of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in Australia and …
Office aerobics c.1917
It’s not unusual for people to think that today’s vices are worse than anything we’ve seen before in history, but this is plainly nonsense. Paleolithic cave-dwellers were just as worried about food security as we are today and Victorians worried about the accelerating pace of life as much, perhaps even …
A century of blind physiotherapists
2019 marks the centenary of the first ever physiotherapy special interest group. The Association of Blind Certified Masseurs (changed in 1953 to The Association of Blind Chartered Physiotherapists), was formed by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, then the Incorporated Society of Trained Masseuses (ISTM), in 1919 in response to three …
The Primary Contact Physiotherapist
In 1976 the Australian Journal of Physiotherapy published an article by Prue Galley titled ‘Patient referral and the physiotherapist’. This article was a synthesis of the debates and arguments about whether Australian physiotherapists were ready to act as primary contact professionals. Galley asked: Have we as physiotherapists, the knowledge, the …