Kropp, varande och mening i ett sjukgymnastiskt perspektiv

Abstract

Undefined pain and tension is a major health problem in contemporary society and for the health care system. This thesis argues that the physiotherapeutic understanding of the body, and the possibilities inherent in working with bodily experience, can contribute to new perspectives in rehabilitating people suffering from undefined pain and tension.The research seeks to enrich perspectives on the body and physiotherapy by adopting methods influenced by hermeneutic, phenomenological and social constructivist viewpoints. Six physiotherapists, with long experience in treating problems of undefined pain and tension, psychosomatic and psychosocial disorders, were selected and filmed in natural treatment settings with patients. Subsequent dialogues with each physiotherapist, taking its departure from the filmed sessions, allowed different phenomena in the treatment to be identified and given meaning. This understanding was analysed and then discussed in seminars with the physiotherapists. Lastly, the research undertook a phenomenological analysis of the general meaning structure of the understanding reached and placed the body and physiotherapy in existential and social perspectives.The thesis understands the body as a person's existential anchoring in the world. The body is a person s relation to the world, and expressive of the meaning in that relation. The patients main problems, the thesis argues, lie in a lack of contact with the body and thereby a lost ability to create meaning in relation to the life situation. The research concludes that physiotherapy is a socially constructed process in which meaning is created from bodily experience. Physiotherapy opens in this process an opportunity to bridge the gap between biomedical and psychotherapeutic alternatives in the rehabilitation of persons suffering from undefined pain and tension.