David Nicholls' new book: Physioheresy

An enjoyable reminder of the places we’ve been and the people who came along for the first ten years of the CPN

10 years ago the Critical Physiotherapy Network was formed with the goal of being a positive force for an otherwise physiotherapy. 

Over the decade, the CPN has helped make critical physiotherapy a vibrant new sub-discipline, and inaugurated a wealth of new critical scholarship in and around physiotherapy.

An important feature of the community was the critical physiotherapy website and its blog, which produced more than 1,000 posts over the ten years and helped grow the CPN membership from a handful of early adopters to an organisation with more than 1,000 members in nearly 60 countries around the world. 

To celebrate the centenary I’ve spent the last year re-reading the CPN blog and compiling the posts into an edited collection that was released this week.

Physioheresy is a fully free ebook and pdf curated collection of all of the scholarly blogposts from the CPN over the last 10 years.

The book is divided into 12 chapters taking you through how the CPN was set up, the ways we challenged physiotherapy orthodoxy, everyday practice issues, learning and teaching, the 30 Days of September campaigns, CPN people and their work, and a host of other topics.

Each chapter comes with a short introduction and all of the chapters are hyperlinked and easily searchable in both ebook and pdf form.

Compiling the book proved to be a bigger task than I’d anticipated because even after all of the incidental posts had been removed the book still ran to more than 300,000 words. But the search feature makes it easy to find CPN people and ideas as they appear all the way through the text. 

So for those of you who have been part of the CPN, or have had an interest in how it was set up and ran, the book should prove an enjoyable reminder of the places we’ve been and the people who came along for the ride.

You can download your own copy of the book here.