Category: Editorial
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Physiotherapy history at WCPT: Pictures and Stories
The International Physiotherapy History Association has been running for more than a year now, and we have had an executive committee in place since October, so we are nearly a year old as a formal …
Remembering Brian Davey
We heard last week of the recent death of Brian Davey. I had the good fortune to interview Brian as part of the centenary celebrations for New Zealand physiotherapists in 2013, and it was only …
A brief history of Brazil’s Federal Council of Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy (English & Portuguese)
The aspiration in forming the Council was to create a federal entity that would act as ethical and social regulator of the profession, whose advent resulted from the work of the Brazilian Association of Physical …