The body and physiotherapy

Abstract

In recent years, physiotherapists have been increasingly interested in defining their professional identity. At the heart of this interest lies a fundamental question about the role that the body plays in defining physiotherapy practice. Given the importance of the body to physiotherapy, it is surprising how under-theorized the body is in existing physiotherapy literature. With a few notable exceptions, the body as a philosophical/theoretical construct has been almost entirely bypassed by the profession. In this paper the authors argue that a renewed interest in the meaning given to the body by physiotherapists is timely, and offer a sociohistorical critique of the role the body has played in defining physiotherapy practice. We challenge physiotherapists' longstanding affinity with a biomechanical view of the body, arguing that whilst this approach may have been critically important in the past, it is now increasingly clear that a more diverse and inclusive approach to the body will be needed in the future. The authors explore the notion of embodiment and suggest ways in which embodiment theory might be applied to physiotherapy practice.

Declaration of Interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

¹A ‘Cartesian’ view of the body derives from René Descartes (1596–1650), who argued that the body ought to be considered separate from the mind: the mind being the seat of the soul; sacred and God-like; the machine-like body being profane and prone to failure. This view was very powerful in the early renaissance and in the separation of the natural sciences, particularly medicine, from religion and its association with superstitious beliefs about the causes of illness.

²Some authors have argued that medicine promoted the idea of ‘the quack’ as a way of demonstrating the profession's authority and professionalism (Fournier, 1999, 2002). Medicine, like all orthodox professions, has no doubt benefit from the idea that it is different to, and by extension better than, homeopathy, osteopathy, and chiropractic, for example.