Last week, the WCPT unveiled its latest briefing paper titled Access to physical therapist entry level education and practice for persons with disabilities. This paper and supporting resources are significant, not only for their critical and radical statements on the relationship between physiotherapists and people with disabilities, but also because they situate one of the profession's leading advocacy organisations in the position of critiquing physiotherapy's longstanding atheism towards disability rights. Physiotherapists have long paid lip-service to the idea that they advocate for the rights of disabled people, but have systematically excluded disabled people from training (with the exception, perhaps of blind therapists and injured ex-servicemen), and have even been accused of being parasitic towards disability by creating new categories of illness and injury that they are, themselves, particularly well suited to remedy (Swain, French & Cameron, 2003). Read in this context, the WCPT's briefing paper represents an innovative, well-executed, well-considered project, that isn't afraid of identifying entrenched apathy and intransigence, or for suggesting that we could do more than we have done before. Recently, a number of physiotherapists have offered new critical insights into the role disability plays in rehabilitation. Barbara Gibson, for example, recently argued that;
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WCPT advocates for the inclusion of people…
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Last week, the WCPT unveiled its latest briefing paper titled Access to physical therapist entry level education and practice for persons with disabilities. This paper and supporting resources are significant, not only for their critical and radical statements on the relationship between physiotherapists and people with disabilities, but also because they situate one of the profession's leading advocacy organisations in the position of critiquing physiotherapy's longstanding atheism towards disability rights. Physiotherapists have long paid lip-service to the idea that they advocate for the rights of disabled people, but have systematically excluded disabled people from training (with the exception, perhaps of blind therapists and injured ex-servicemen), and have even been accused of being parasitic towards disability by creating new categories of illness and injury that they are, themselves, particularly well suited to remedy (Swain, French & Cameron, 2003). Read in this context, the WCPT's briefing paper represents an innovative, well-executed, well-considered project, that isn't afraid of identifying entrenched apathy and intransigence, or for suggesting that we could do more than we have done before. Recently, a number of physiotherapists have offered new critical insights into the role disability plays in rehabilitation. Barbara Gibson, for example, recently argued that;