Filippo Cavallaro (Università degli studi di Messina)
Rosario Fiolo (Università degli studi di Palermo)
Mariachiara Ceccio (Università degli studi di Messina)
Teresa Pintaudi (Università degli studi di Messina)
Francesco Bonanno (Università degli studi di Messina)
In 2013, “The Epistemological Statute of Physiotherapy” was drafted in Messina and then was published in Aifi’s official journal “Fisioterapisti” 55/2014. It was the synthesis gained in months, studying the founding documents of the profession.
The Professional Profile, Code of Ethics, Core Competence and Core Curriculum represent the foundation on which the Epistemological Statute is built. This foundation charter would have described the physiotherapy discipline allowing its growth and development.
There was an awareness that physiotherapy, like medicine, dealing with living and unique beings, needed a practice of tailored therapeutic interventions, activities and treatments in the management of the person’s functional recovery.
The Epistemological Statute was proposed as a link between the complexity of science and the heterogeneity of morality
The congress theme led us to take a fresh look at the documents produced since the promulgation of the Professional Profile DM 741, 14.9.1994.
These are: Code of ethics, Core competencies and Core curriculum.
The references that helped us to look with a different point of view were the rereading of the works of Maturana and Varela and the enlightening contribution of Edgar Morin.
Maturana and Varela state that “all living beings are equal as long as they are alive” because by the fact that they are all living, in them are fulfilled all the necessary conditions for an uninterrupted ontogeny of the individual. They also declare that with the study and the development of knowledge we have moved from the “innocence of knowledge” to the “knowledge of the knowledge”. In fact the knowledge of knowledge obliges us to keep an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. The relationship that we create with others, with the patient, is an act of coexistence, and for this reason it is human. “This bond between human beings is the foundation of all ethics as a reflection on the legitimacy of the other’s presence”.
Morin teaches us that “The sciences … have not only a proper complexity to human realities, but also a particular issue, because the researchers of these disciplines are human beings, who works on, with and for other human beings.” He directs us toward a reasoning that can grasp the multidimensionality of realities, recognizing the interactive and retroactive interplay, dealing with complexities, rather than giving up to the ideological oppositions or to the mutilations dictated by exaggerated specialization (the new pathology of knowledge). For Morin, “Human needs are not only economic or technical, but also affective and mythological.”
However, this does not detract that medical treatments that do not take into consideration the wholeness of the organism and its complexity. Often these dimensions have undesirable side effects. Health and disease should both be considered as subjective experiences, Morin says, emerging from the specific bio-psycho-social-environmental evolutionary interweaving that characterizes each individual uniquely and unrepeatably. For this reason personalized intervention procedures are required, and nowadays the lack of these tailor-made protocols is severely complained
Only with a link between the complexity and the ongoing relationship between scientific education and moral growth we will have a new epistemological status
