Anne Marit Mengshoel - 30 DoS - Day 5
During my professional life, I have been curious about what characterise good physiotherapy practice. I doubt that evidence-based guidelines necessarily improve practice. To me, CPN is a forum to discuss such matters. Working on a book chapter recently published by CPN, I engaged in critical writing that I otherwise would not have been doing. Hopefully, the book may nurture critical thinking within physiotherapy. I welcome similar initiatives and virtual meetings among members in the future.
Autumn 2020, my engagement in the EU-Cost EUROMENE was completed. The members from more than 20 European countries participated in work on diagnostic classification, pathological mechanisms, epidemiology, and health care costs related to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS/ME). The cultural diversities and power of knowledge among the members became an interesting issue in itself. My deliverable was a mixed method scoping review of effects from non-pharmacological therapies and qualitative studies of patient treatment experiences, presenting one story about little effects from non-pharmacological interventions, and a quite different story about patients’ needs for legitimation and support from health professionals and others. This paper was published; but it did not influence the EUROMENE recommendations for future research. Nevertheless, my benefit was a new network and being a co-supervisor for two PhD students examining recovery experiences of prior patients.
This year, the results from the study ‘From theory to practice — development of a patient education program for patients with fibromyalgia (FM)’ was published. The paper described the development, purpose and content of the program, and its meaning for those involved. A multidisciplinary rehabilitation team and researchers coproduced the program by bridging evidence about FM and recovery experiences of prior patients with FM, positive clinical experiences and various professional knowledge. Similar work is now going on in collaboration with physiotherapists in primary health care. In this work, our comprehensive understanding of recovery as elaborated on in the chapter ’Rethinking recovery’ for the recent CPN book Mobilizing Knowledge will play a role by highlighting patients’ own healing work.
During the last half year, the broad understanding of recovery has underpinned the development of a theoretical platform for physiotherapists delivering services to patients with rheumatic inflammatory diseases. Together with physiotherapists in a specialised hospital in rheumatology, we systematically explored the historical development within rheumatology and physiotherapy, discourses of rehabilitation, evidence-based practice and patient-centred care, and the clinical experiences of present physiotherapy practice. The theoretical platform is expressed in terms of; body-object and functions that should be ‘repaired’, and body-subject and functioning related to support a person’s need of re-familiarising with an alien body to heal one’s life and self. Our notion was that the body-subject seemed to be a hidden and non-verbalised clinical practice at the hospital.
My wish for the future is that physiotherapists will devote more work to explore practice processes to find out what is important ingredients and clarify why they eventually are valuable. My hope is that this may humanise a technologising of clinical practice.