The 5th Critical Physiotherapy Course is in 10 days time

The 5th of this year's free online Critical Physiotherapy Courses will be on Wednesday 9th September at 8pm UK time.

This month features Viviana Silva and Wendy Lowe's chapter for the upcoming Mobilizing knowledge book, titled Feeling good about yourself? An exploration of Fitbit “New Moms community” as an emergent space for online biosociality.

Here is the Introduction to Viviana and Wendy's chapter

The rise of technologically mediated exercise provides a challenge for physiotherapists because professional boundaries can become blurred with personal; patients can negotiate their own way through rehabilitation and perhaps may trust traditional healthcare providers less. Traditional assumptions based on qualified physiotherapists as being the best providers of post-baby recovery assessment and treatment are questioned by technological savvy mothers who prefer to engage with online communities via FitBit wearable devices and apps. This chapter engages with critical scholarship on the subject of FitBit communities by exploring the literature in sociology and philosophy fields, identifying gaps in the literature about how physiotherapists engage critically with the technological material, and reflecting on participants’ technological, cultural, material and social aspects of fitness practice. We will explore notions of competition and self-policing to reconceptualise how physiotherapists can engage with the world of technologically mediated exercise. By doing so, we hope to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, and therefore power, around expert versus novice knowledge.

One of the main motivations for writing this chapter was the recent motherhood experience of one of the authors [AVS]. Having trained as a physiotherapist and finding some of the biomedical language challenging to engage with when writing about patients as it felt dehumanising and depersonalising, I felt ambivalent about physiotherapy when applied to myself as a new mother. However, when I turned to FitBit to increase my fitness post-delivery, I felt alarmed with the competitive online environment and worried that participants could do more harm than good to themselves, from my physiotherapist perspective. I struggled to reconcile these different perspectives. This struggle is explored in the following text, with the acknowledgement that the biomedical scaffolding is useful in some respects; yet it is not the whole story. In our experience, this is a common struggle for healthcare professionals – how to write and live different discourses once exposed to wider horizons of knowledge yet retaining prior understandings. Whilst FitBit provides an opportunity for user empowerment by increasing their fitness on their terms, their perception of themselves as empowered consumers may be at odds with the sense that they become the products of this type of technology.

In addition, the second author [WL] also struggled with integrating knowledge from different disciplines. I went from physiotherapist, to researcher, to educator and completed my PhD on health professional training drawing on critical pedagogy and sociology. In practice, I went from biomedical domination to the opposite end of the spectrum, decrying all neo-liberalism and instead identifying with a post-structuralist deconstruction of healthcare. However, now I am working in a medical school, I have been challenged again by having to bring sociology into my teaching, whilst grappling with the context that does not always appreciate this perspective. Relating different paradigms to each other is hard and is much easier when outside the location one is critiquing. But I recognise that this is a crucial movement; a process which deserves commitment if we are to change healthcare for the benefit of patients and marginalised people.

This work is unique because it brings together the critical scholarly work on online communities, fitness, motherhood and our health professional perspectives. To our knowledge, there has been no critical scholarship in the physiotherapy field that examines the interaction between health professional perspectives and mothers’ use of a FitBit app. This is in spite of digital eHealth being seen as a panacea for organisational issues in healthcare itself.

Here is the Zoom link: https://aut.zoom.us/j/4850164660