Physiotherapy stands at a critical threshold. For decades, we have accepted the docility of a technical role, operating under a clinical gaze that fragments the human being into broken parts, reducing the body to a machine in need of repair solely to be quickly returned to the cogs of productivity. We are living through the exhaustion of a biomedical model that, in its obsession with tissue healing, has forgotten the person.
Is this the only path? The perpetuation of invisible technicians within a performance society that sickens its citizens and then demands we return them, silent and functional, to the very system that consumes them? And is our image not being eroded by the flight towards mysticism and the pseudosciences that peddle illusions?
The true power of the profession lies, rather, in a body of rigorous knowledge, stripped of unfounded beliefs and anchored in evidence. Only scientific truth liberates us from hierarchical subservience. Technique is vital, but it cannot be the sole horizon.
In this context, the Social Physiotherapist emerges as a necessary rupture. The clinical territory ceases to be a closed space of mechanical rehabilitation and becomes a social observatory.
The physiotherapist now has the freedom to assume the role of Social Architect, capable of reading the fault lines of social anatomy and intervening not only in the consequences, but in the political and urban causes of suffering. The goal is clear: to attribute an active social matrix to Physiotherapy, restoring its intellectual dignity and the power to transform the world.
By João Amendoeira Peixoto