Connectivity: An emerging concept for physiotherapy practice

ABSTRACT

Having spent their first century anchored to a biomedical model of practice, physiotherapists have been increasingly interested in exploring new models and concepts that will better equip them for serving the health-care needs of 21st century clients/patients. Connectivity offers one such model. With an extensive philosophical background in phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism, and postmodern research, connectivity resists the prevailing western biomedical view that health professionals should aim to increase people’s independence and autonomy, preferring instead to identify and amplify opportunities for collaboration and co-dependence. Connectivity critiques the normalization that underpins modern health care, arguing that our constant search for deviance is building stigma and discrimination into our everyday practice. It offers provocative opportunities for physiotherapists to rethink some of the fundamental tenets of their profession and better align physiotherapy with 21st century societal expectations. In this paper, we provide a background to the place connectivity may play in future health care, and most especially future physiotherapy practice. The paper examines some of the philosophical antecedents that have made connectivity an increasingly interesting and challenging concept in health care today.

KEYWORDS:

• Connectivity
• phenomenology
• physiotherapy
• postmodernism
• structuralism
• symbolic interactionism

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Declaration of interests

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notes

^1. We have used the generic term clients/patients throughout the text as a convenient device to refer to our clients, consumers, patients and service users. We are aware that each term carries particularly loaded meaning, but it is not our purpose to debate these here. For a discussion of issues of naming, see McLaughlin (2009).

^2. We have used the term “disabled people” in preference to “people with disability” throughout the text to be reflect the convention within the disability rights sector, which argues that people are disabled by physical environments and entrenched social attitudes rather than by the presence of an impairment (Hughes, 2007).