Physical Therapy is a rehabilitation process that uses different types of treatments and approaches that best suits the type of injury it is trying to overcome. As a physical therapy patient for my ankle, I was able to experience first hand what type of work is done and the train of thought that physical therapists have when working with patients. I started with stretching, then placed my foot in a whirlpool, got a massage on my foot and calf, was given electrical impulses around the injured area, and then I was finally sent home with a set of exercises to do in order to strengthen the muscles around the ankle
Looking back at the types of treatments I went through, there were at least two different approaches that my therapists gave me probably without knowing they could be broken down into philosophical approaches. I was able to see materialism and holism being displayed in the practices used by my physical therapist. Being able to notice these philosophical approaches makes viewing the human body and they way treatments work on it, more interesting to me. It puts a new way or perspective of thinking about how people function.
I first want to take a look at the materialism aspect of philosophy and how it was used to treat my ankle. This approach only takes into consideration the physical aspect with no regards to consciousness or spirit. There were two treatments that I did for my ankle that I would consider in the category of materialism. The first one was the whirlpool machine. My leg was just sitting in there for about 20 minutes getting relaxed while I could have been taking a nap. The reason I view this as materialism is because it took no conscious effort for my muscles to relax and it was just the machine doing all the work. The other form of treatment that was used on me was the electrical stimulus to the area around the injury. My muscles were involuntarily being triggered which even though I wasn’t able to feel it; I found it to be an awesome and interesting experience.
Looking at dualism and how my mind and body were separate during a certain part of the treatment explains Robinson’s definition of philosophical dualism. He states that dualism is separated by mental and physical which can never assimilate to each other. My instructions to do exercises at home for a certain amount of time before returning to the office the following week is something that I would consider as dualistic. Remembering and forcing myself to do the exercises everyday was a struggle and I had to focus on the muscles that I was trying to use. I had to use a band and stretch my ankle with pronation and supination.
The stretches that I was asked to do before exercising was my holistic approach. It is something that I continue to do even though I don’t go to physical therapy anymore. Before running or doing squats it has become a routine that I do to finish my stretches first. Susan Ramsey is a physical therapist that actually uses the holistic approach in her work. She says that entire organisms can’t be separated but instead they are inherently a whole.
I enjoyed my time in physical therapy and actually being treated with a “hands on” approach which could be dissected in a philosophical level. Unlike the article by Verghese that we had to read for class where patients were more treated based on what the computers and CT Scans were saying, physical therapy relies more on treatment with exercise which influenced me to become interested in this profession.
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