Aged care as a bellwether of future physiotherapy

ABSTRACT

Aged care is becoming an increasingly significant feature of health care, but it is not an area physiotherapists have traditionally favored. Aging populations of increasingly chronically ill people represent the most important community of need in health care however, and so physiotherapists risk being marginalized if they do not adapt their practices to meet this growing need. Aged care may therefore represent a testing ground for a new physiotherapy, and the lessons learned in reforming physiotherapy for older adults may extend to all aspects of practice. In this paper, I explore how our current approach to aged care came about, and make the case for change. Having critiqued biomedicine, I also argue that the newer holistic models of health care are equally inadequate, because they attempt to dissolve important philosophical differences between physical, experiential, and social paradigms into an amorphous whole. I argue that these ‘embodied’ models of health make a holistic approach to aged care impossible and, instead, suggest new materialism and object-oriented ontologies as alternative physiotherapy paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• Aged care
• physiotherapy
• future
• object-oriented ontology
• new materialism

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflict of interest.

Notes

1. A ‘bellwether’ refers to something that indicates a trend or predicts a future event. In the US presidential election, for example, some states are called ‘bellwether states’ because they have often predicted the outcome of the election.

2. This phrase has been attributed to David P. Hanna, but many versions of a similar phrase now exist.