[Rehabilitation as interdisciplinary responsibility--the medical specialty "physical and rehabilitative medicine"]

Physical and rehabilitation medicine is an independent medical subspecialty and is not derived from "physics" but from "physis-nature". Beside the elements of specific movements, it does use physical components such as heat, cold, light, water, and electricity for therapeutic purposes. Physical medicine and rehabilitation has always been a discipline with own methods, issues, and own areas of research and theory. The treatment techniques of this specialty are summarized under the term "physiotherapy". Its methods, which also contain balneology and medical climatology, are using physical and physiological principles of order in the organism. The application of this therapy happens for the training of impaired functions, influence of pathogenetic processes causing pain, and for the activation of the body's regeneration capacities. Physiotherapy is not limited to certain diseases or stages of illness but may prevent, abolish, or weaken malregulation of functional units, especially when used in repetitions. A particular focus of the rehabilitation is to address the still remaining functional reserves of an injured organism in a way that a compensation can be reached as close a possible to the etiological point of the pathogenetic chain of causes. Declared goal of the physiotherapy is the induction and optimization of healing processes. Due to this interdisciplinary approach, physical and rehabilitation medicine is an essential part for almost every medical subspecialty. Because of the increasing importance of this discipline, the specialist for physicial and rehabilitation medicine was introduced in Germany in 1992.