David Nicholls | University of Auckland | Australia
Physiotherapy always seems to be in crisis. If it’s not the crisis of funding or the threat from competition, it’s the loss of professional identity or the lack of high quality clinical evidence. And yet, in recent years a number of physiotherapists have read these threats as an opportunity to radically rethink our practice. These people offer some radical and exciting ways to think about the physical therapies and the theories that underpin them. In this talk I want to give a brief guided tour of these new emerging fields and lay a breadcrumb trail for you to follow. Starting by acknowledging some of the many problems being faced by the profession, I show why the four main ways the profession is responding are understandable but inadequate (including our spurious current claim to be biopsychosocial). I then talk about some of the new emerging ideas in physiotherapy that are now pushing the boundaries of our practice. Many of these are radical and challenging, but they all derive from people within the profession looking for exciting ways to think about future physiotherapy. As Deleuze said, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”.