The Church of Physiotherapy: The Necessity for Betrayal

Abstract

This paper draws lines of similarity between physiotherapy’s transcendent ontology and that of Christian fundamentalism. Like fundamentalism, I argue that physiotherapy dogmatically conforms to a limited, incontroversial Truth upheld by an unacknowledged imagined community which opposes epistemological and ontological mobility. Using this confluence, I illustrate how betraying physiotherapy becomes necessary in order to escape its conformist ontology. This essay reimagines God as an immanent creator through Gilles Deleuze’s ontology, which concurrently reifies physiotherapy and its ontology with one of immanence and difference. To escape the habituation of thought and make physiotherapy strange, I intentionally use unconventional and unfamiliar diction throughout this essay, creatively experimenting with the generative potential of Viktor Schlovosky’s concept of defamiliarization. By betraying the comfort of transcendence, affirming difference and unfamiliarity, we experiment with what physiotherapy could become.