My critical physiotherapy Christmas list
Santa is a busy chap so needs help to know who's been naughty and whose been nice.
I've tried my best to be nice this year. Honestly I have. So I thought I'd draw up a critical physiotherapy Christmas list of the things I'd like in my stocking on Christmas morning.
Dear Santa,
Could I please have:
A physiotherapy journal that refuses, on principal, to publish any article where the authors use the words evidence-based practice, musculoskeletal, neurological, cardiorespiratory, mixed methods, systematic, descriptive, thematic, or any word ending in -itis.
A return to a properly funded public health system.
An overhaul to the weighting of academic journals. I'd like all journal's publishing qualitative research to have an impact factor of at least 30.
While you're at it, could I also have a Gates Foundation grant for...oh, I don't know, $20 million...to study the history of physical therapies in the 19th century please?
By law, could every meeting at the Department of Health include a representative of the physiotherapy profession?
Could you also make it so that all physiotherapy journals have unlimited word counts? (I'm happy to trade in the use of tables, scatterplots and graphical models that ridiculously oversimplify complicated ideas if you could make this happen.)
Lets also go with PowerPoint templates that do not allow presenters to use bullet points. They can only use pictures from now on.
Could we make it so that any of our colleagues who say that philosophy is full of complicated language are reminded that flexor hallucis brevis is also complicated and that, somehow, they coped with that okay? (You also punish them by making them read 'Being and Time'.)
A special punishment should reserved for anyone who uses the phrase 'sitting is the new smoking.' My personal preference would be to make them sit in a wheelchair for a month but I can lead the details up to you.
...and finally, could you please make sure that the mighty Wolverhampton Wanderers sign Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo in the closed season.
That's all. I hope everyone in the Critical Physiotherapy Network has an extra special holiday and a joyous and peaceful New Year.