A Critical Physical Therapy: Towads the Democratization of Health Care
]This paper will address the development of a Critical Physical Therapy. Critical Physical Therapy (CPT) is physical therapy education and practice that is able to self-critique, that recognizes how the hegemonic nature of biomedicine disempowers and marginalizes patients, is able to deconstruct authoritative physical therapy knowledge and practice and co-creates interdependence with patients in order to empower and facilitate a more liberating and democratic health care practice. Critical Physical Therapy would include: a radical deconstruction of the body to transform it from its biological reductionist exclusivity to a recognition of multiple bodies across space/place and time at which to direct healing, a recognition that patients can deliberately and /or spontaneously create non-capitalist and non-biomedical pockets of healing, a recognition that patient resistance with its various forms of manifestation is always going to be present, demystification of scientific/medical language, the non-medicalization of non-medical problems, examination of the authoritative nature of medical knowledge, and the recognition of the power that ableism confers, and that the label and category of disability is a social construction.
Keywords: Critical Physical Therapy, Hegemony, Biomedicine, Ableism
Dr. James Brennan
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Physical Therapy, The Sage Colleges
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Ref: D07P0226