Objecting: Multiplicity and the practice of physiotherapy.

Area of Science:

• Health Care Practices
• Physiotherapy
• Philosophy of Medicine

Background:

• Contemporary physiotherapy often faces reductive biomedical discourses.
• Under-theorized and marginalized practices within physiotherapy warrant exploration.
• Annemarie Mol's concept of multiplicity offers a framework for analyzing health care enactments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore how health care practices, specifically physiotherapy, enact their objects.
• To mobilize and examine under-theorized or marginalized ways of practicing physiotherapy.
• To investigate how acknowledging multiplicity can broaden physiotherapy practice and resist closure.

Main Methods:

• Drawing upon Annemarie Mol's conceptualization of multiplicity.
• Analyzing physiotherapy practices, particularly those in interstitial spaces.
• Utilizing an exemplar from a rehabilitation setting to examine object construction.

Main Results:

• Physiotherapy practices often subvert reductive biomedical discourses.
• Physiotherapy enacts multiple objects, which are subsequently suppressed.
• Highlighting multiplicities reveals broader potential objects of practice in physiotherapy.

Conclusions:

• Acknowledging multiplicity can broaden the scope of physiotherapy practice.
• This approach offers a way to resist the closure characteristic of contemporary physiotherapy.
• Understanding multiplicity has broader implications for health care and rehabilitation.