Touching and Being Touched During Physiotherapy Exercise Instruction

Abstract

AbstractThis contribution focuses on a physiotherapy consultation in which the first author of the contribution is the patient and the second author is the physiotherapist. It features analysis of video excerpts in which (1) the physiotherapist instructs the patient how to do an exercise and (2) the patient turns the physiotherapist's instructions into a course of action while (3) the physiotherapist monitors, assesses, guides, and corrects the patient's instructed actions by deploying touch. The investigation draws on video-recordings and transcriptions of the physiotherapist’s and the patient’s interaction during the exercise instructions, the authors’ experience of touching/being touched during these instructions, and their shared understandings as discussed during data-sessions devoted to select video-clips of exercise instructions. In a learning process, the instructor’s instructional corrections are critical: they provide learners with relevant specifications and explanations as to how instructed actions and/or remedial actions are to be accomplished. Whereas monitoring and touching the patient allows the physiotherapist to feel, assess, correct, and guide the patient’s instructed actions, being touched permits the patient to feel how the physiotherapist’s touch resonates beyond locally circumscribed body contact and adapt her movements accordingly. Our contribution thus reveals touching/being touched configurations that establish joint attention and action on extended sensoriality as forming constitutive parts of a dynamic sensorimotor process of inter- and intrabodily resonance, which is challenging to investigate.