7 Closing words

This book works from the adage that if you want to see the future look in a telescope, but if you want to know what you’re seeing, look at the telescope. It is early days in physiotherapy’s sociological study of itself, so this book can be little more than a primer to what is now a vast field of scholarship. Naturally, there are many omissions and shortcuts. I often refer to physiotherapy as if it were a homogeneous entity, a singular thing, when clearly it is anything but. I hope you will see this as shorthand rather than laziness. The book is also a book of the sociology of physiotherapy, not sociology in physiotherapy. My focus is on ways of understanding the profession, not necessarily all the sociological fields to which physiotherapy applies. The book is also highly critical. Not in the nihilistic or pessimistic sense, but in the exact opposite postmodern sense, in which critical thinking opens up new spaces for a thousand possible alternatives. I hope it is what Rita Felski called a ‘distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self‐evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths’ ^[1].

The reader I am most anxious about is the person who wants to hold on to physiotherapy at all costs; who would preserve the good name of the profession even after it has run its course. I am anxious that there are many people within the profession who will try to hold on to physiotherapy’s long-fought-for prestige for sentimental reasons, even if it had been shown that other ways would serve people better. As with my previous book, Physiotherapy Otherwise openly explores whether we are seeing the end of the profession. But as I argued in EoP, this is not because I see our knowledge and skills becoming obsolete; only the idea of a bounded profession, regulating, controlling, educating, and preserving physiotherapy in the mistaken assumption that, once established, it will endure forever. The jury is very much out on this question, and even after more than 30 years of researching physiotherapy as a social entity, I can tell you that I’m yet to find a definitive answer. What we do know, though, is that all of the professions are now under pressure, and physiotherapy may be no more immune to rapid and profound disruption than accountancy, manufacturing, and journalism.

One final qualification also needs to be stated. As a white, English-born, straight, non-disabled, professional, middle-class, cis-man, I am acutely aware of my privilege in being able to give voice to these ideas. Would it be possible for me to make the claims laid out in this book if I were a young black therapist trying to build a career, a female academic in an aggressively heteronormative culture, or someone not in a position of professional privilege? I believe strongly that it would not. So, I hope I have done justice to that privilege and used it to ‘kick up’, not ‘kick down’. As Natalie Wynn from Contrapoints argues, it’s all well and good proclaiming that the house is burning down when it’s not your house. But it is my house, and being a critical insider feels important right now. Paul de Man once said that you can only deconstruct what you love, “because you are doing it from the inside, with real intimacy” ^[2]. So, this book is underpinned by a deep ‘curiosity about how to make sense of… what is going on in the world around us’ ^[3], using well-developed and well-honed tools that have, up to this point, largely evaded physiotherapists.