Category: Critical Research & Perspectives

Accessibility Accommodations on the National Physical Therapy Examination: An Exploratory-Descriptive Qualitative Study

This study reports on the negative impact on some NPTE candidates of seeking accessibility accommodations. The results show that requesting accommodations for testing puts an additional burden on these students, which can affect their academic, and even their professional, lives. The authors call for “improved ease of access to information,” and “a more streamlined approach nationwide” to the exam process for persons with disabilities.

Advocating for Palliative Care Is Our Role: A Physical Therapist Perspective

This insightful and moving article argues for wider use of palliative care in end-of-life situations. Written from her personal experience with terminal patients, the author notes how, ironically, a focus on positivity can deny the much-needed comfort that palliative care provides. Contrasting a rural southern hospital and a top urban neurorehabilitation facility, she notes how her patients received more end-of-life comfort in the former. She calls for physical therapists to “advocate for better integration of palliative care principles into PT practice.”

A Healthy Neck Should Disappear: a Phenomenological Anatomy of ‘Body-With-Neck-in-the-World’ to Inform Clinical Research and Practice

What is the actual role of the neck in a person’s overall well being? How might a deeper understanding of the “neck-in-the-world” contribute to treatment of neck pain? This fascinating article offers a unique perspective on the neck “as a part of the body gestalt,” and explores how understanding its true role may lead to innovations in pain management.

A Seat at the Table: A Reflection on Engaging Disabled People and Their Families in Research and Service Design

Dr. Phoenix and authors explore the metaphor “a seat at the table” in the context of including Disabled People and their families in system-level service design and research. They challenge us to consider inclusivity by interrogating this vision of “the table” in terms of ownership, participation, and consequences after a discussion ends.

How Structural Oppression Has Shaped the Physical Therapy Profession and Access to Rehabilitative Services

Physical therapy has been practiced in the US for more than 100 years. But have rehabilitative services been the same for all Americans? These authors show how Black, Brown, and Indigenous People have not fully reaped the rewards of this, or any, aspect of the US healthcare system. They state that the nation’s “structural racism” continues to shape “exclusion of racialized persons from all levels of physical therapy.” They offer this article as a “first step in better understanding this history”—and in finding real solutions.

Doing Healthcare Research Differently: An Introduction to SocioHealthLab’s Special Video Series, Part 2

The SocioHealthLab “is a research collective of health and social science researchers, practitioners and students from Australia and around the world, striving for healthcare transformation through applied, justice-oriented, theory-driven, creative and collaborative socio-cultural research.” In this final video installment, authors share their creative works that range from a “poetic meditation navigating” life with aphasia to “healthcare related to sex and intimacy in the disability space.”

Accommodating Students With Disabilities in Professional Rehabilitation Programs: An Institutional Ethnography Informed Study

In this enlightening study, 11 educators and 4 staff members from one Canadian university were interviewed about their work of accommodating students with disabilities in their occupational therapy and physiotherapy programs. The authors identify a “false dichotomy” that places the needs of these students in opposition with some of the professional requirements of a practicing clinician—and suggest some solutions.

Doing Healthcare Research Differently: An Introduction to SocioHealthLab’s Special Video Series, Part 1

In this first of two installments within SocioHealthLab’s special video series with JHR, the authors “begin doing health research dissemination differently” by telling their “story/stories” through animation, music, sound, and discourse. The videos shared here range from heart-rending personal patient experiences of pain and fear, to a humorous ‘what-if’ look at rehabilitation processes with the use of cartoon animals. Viewers are invited to relax and share these brief accounts in a “quiet space.”

A Reorientation of Belief: Considerations for Increasing the Recruitment of Black Students Into Canadian Physiotherapy Programs

Guided by the work of cultural theorist Sara Ahmed and critical race scholar Camara Phyllis Jones, these authors explore the perspectives of experts regarding barriers to and opportunities for increasing the recruitment of Black students into physical therapy programs in Canada.

Toward a Social Psychoanalysis of Rehabilitation Practice

In a fascinating and thought-provoking piece, Thomas Abrams calls on the works of Sigmund Freud, and of modern critics and interpreters of Freud, to explore the rehabilitation clinic as a “space of desire.” What desires motivate patients and rehabilitation teams alike?

What’s at Stake With Biomusic? Ethical Reflections on an Emerging Technology

Biomusic, emerging technology that translates physiological signals into sound/musical output may offer utility as an assistive technology for people with autism. The authors explore a variety of perspectives in humanities and social sciences to reflect on the ethical issues at stake with the use of biomusic in rehabilitation.

Perspectives On ‘Person-Centeredness’ From Neurological Rehabilitation and Critical Theory: Toward a Critical Constellation

Jenni Aittokallio, PT, MH and Anna Ilona Rajala, PT, MA explore in-depth the concept of person-centeredness in healthcare and rehabilitation. As a part of their research, they interviewed recipients of neurological rehabilitation, to determine what in their treatment had been truly meaningful for them. The authors suggest that person-centeredness is best viewed as encompassing a complex constellation of factors and issues surrounding each unique patient.

Critical Disability Studies With Rehabilitation: Re-thinking the human in rehabilitation research and practice

In this Perspective, Donya Mosleh, PhD argues for a new mode of scholarly practice that recognizes and addresses tensions between two fields that seemingly occupy opposite ends of a continuum. In order to promote a more productive engagement, critical disability studies with rehabilitation sciences unsettles knowledge relations that position these two fields as oppositional and incompatible.

Finding Help: Exploring the accounts of persons with disabilities in Western Zambia regarding strategies to improve their situation

The main focus of rehabilitation is to provide help to those who need it. But does the Western definition of “help” always apply in other regions? In “Finding Help: Exploring the Accounts of Persons With Disabilities in Western Zambia…,” Shaun R. Cleaver and colleagues present the concept of help in a completely new light, and offer suggestions for a more societally-based approach to healing.

Exploring How Racism Structures Canadian Physical Therapy Programs: Counter-Stories From Racialized Students

The authors of this study conducted in-depth interviews with racialized students or recent graduates of Master’s-level physical therapy programs in Canada. The students described their experiences of white culture, and how well-meaning fellow students simply weren’t aware of the institutionalized racism around them. In compelling quotes, the students detail their feelings of frustration and resignation based on repeated exposure to race-related stereotypes.

‘Making Strange’: Exploring the Development of Students’ Capacity in Epistemic Reflexivity

Engaging in epistemic reflexivity, or the ability to question the ways in which we practice, and their association with organizational and social structures, is the key to gaining a clear perspective on the profession, according to these authors. How can students take a step back, and gain true insight into their professional world? This study employed a 7-step framework to introduce learners to the process of “making strange.”

Gathering on the Wrong Side of the Road: Critical Race Scholarship Across the Health Humanities

In a compelling response to our article, “Exploring How Racism Structures Canadian Physical Therapy Programs,” Dr. Bryan Mukandi offers an account of his critique of early drafts of the article, requested by the authors. He notes that his fear at the time was that the article “was an inadvertent reiteration of the idea that the inclusion of people of color in health disciplines is a matter of charity rather than justice.” Dr. Mukandi expresses the hope that more colleagues like these can gather with those “on the wrong side of the road” to foster dialogue and spur change.

Author Reflection: Rehabilitation: A Post-Critical Approach

Barbara E. Gibson, PhD, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, discusses her book: Rehabilitation: A Post-Critical Approach, a text for rehabilitation science students to engage with critical social theories, providing a framework to think through the application of these ideas to research and practice.

Introducing a New Section of JHR Dedicated to ‘Critical’ Rehabilitation Research and Scholarship

Jenny Setchell, PhD, BScPT and Barbara Gibson, PhD are co- editors of a new section in JHR dedicated to publishing research and scholarship that employ critical perspectives on rehabilitation. They seek submissions applying critical, post structural, or postmodern theories including original research, think pieces, and theoretical discussions of the philosophical basis of rehabilitation practices, education and/or research.

Accessibility Accommodations on the National Physical Therapy Examination: An Exploratory-Descriptive Qualitative Study

This study reports on the negative impact on some NPTE candidates of seeking accessibility accommodations. The results show that requesting accommodations for testing puts an additional burden on these students, which can affect their academic, and even their professional, lives. The authors call for “improved ease of access to information,” and “a more streamlined approach nationwide” to the exam process for persons with disabilities.

Advocating for Palliative Care Is Our Role: A Physical Therapist Perspective

This insightful and moving article argues for wider use of palliative care in end-of-life situations. Written from her personal experience with terminal patients, the author notes how, ironically, a focus on positivity can deny the much-needed comfort that palliative care provides. Contrasting a rural southern hospital and a top urban neurorehabilitation facility, she notes how her patients received more end-of-life comfort in the former. She calls for physical therapists to “advocate for better integration of palliative care principles into PT practice.”

A Healthy Neck Should Disappear: a Phenomenological Anatomy of ‘Body-With-Neck-in-the-World’ to Inform Clinical Research and Practice

What is the actual role of the neck in a person’s overall well being? How might a deeper understanding of the “neck-in-the-world” contribute to treatment of neck pain? This fascinating article offers a unique perspective on the neck “as a part of the body gestalt,” and explores how understanding its true role may lead to innovations in pain management.

A Seat at the Table: A Reflection on Engaging Disabled People and Their Families in Research and Service Design

Dr. Phoenix and authors explore the metaphor “a seat at the table” in the context of including Disabled People and their families in system-level service design and research. They challenge us to consider inclusivity by interrogating this vision of “the table” in terms of ownership, participation, and consequences after a discussion ends.

How Structural Oppression Has Shaped the Physical Therapy Profession and Access to Rehabilitative Services

Physical therapy has been practiced in the US for more than 100 years. But have rehabilitative services been the same for all Americans? These authors show how Black, Brown, and Indigenous People have not fully reaped the rewards of this, or any, aspect of the US healthcare system. They state that the nation’s “structural racism” continues to shape “exclusion of racialized persons from all levels of physical therapy.” They offer this article as a “first step in better understanding this history”—and in finding real solutions.