Diagnosing the body in physiotherapy: the passage from discipline to control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of the body as a biomechanical machine was central to legitimizing physiotherapy and defining its professional identity. As society transitioned from Michel Foucault’s disciplinary formation to Gilles Deleuze’s control societies, this paper examines how physiotherapy’s concept of the body has evolved. We argue that the transition to neoliberal-affective capitalism and control societies has prompted a shift from the reductionist “body-as-machine” to the holistic “body-as-modulation.” We use social theory in conversation with physiotherapy literature, interviews, social media, clinical observations, and clinical experiences, to theorise this shift within the context of musculoskeletal physiotherapy, with implications for the profession. More specifically, we use assemblage theory to diagnose the boundaries of the body-as-modulation, its implications, and entanglement in control societies and the current political economy. We then mobilize Jasbir Puar’s reading of Deleuze to theorize the concept’s built-in assumptions about personhood, longevity, and futurity, and its participation in the modulation of life, death, and debility in the current political moment. We contend that “holistic” movements in physiotherapy, despite their progressive appearance, serve control societies and perpetuate state and corporate power. This paper calls for a critical examination of physiotherapy’s concept of the body and its role in modulating life chances in the context of Euro-American empire.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.112 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".