Profession and life: Separate worlds

How do physiotherapists relate to and examine patients? This question was the point of departure for this article and it immediately gave rise to another: what is the relationship between professional knowledge and general experience? Data were collected as part of a project where encounters between patients and physiotherapists are analysed. The encounters were directly observed and videotaped, and the participants individually interviewed afterwards. The article is based on a detailed analysis of two encounters. It is shown how both therapists direct their examination towards local symptoms and conditions; the emphasis being on joint mobility. The information obtained is adapted to the therapists' biomedical frame of reference. Their interpretations, assessments, and treatment proposals are well within the same frame. In this way historical and clinical data are not 'revealed' but rather constructed; a process which helps transform the patients' problems to solvable problems--for the therapists. Despite the fact that the conception of the body implicit in their diagnostic practice was dualistic, both therapists related to their patients as embodied subjects in many of their general actions. They examined the body as a physical object extrinsic to the self and added the human factor by being interested in the patients as persons through general communication actions. It is argued that the discrepancy between these two views of the body justifies the conclusion that the therapists were operating with unintegrated worlds of knowledge. The findings are interpreted in light of general perspectives on the relationship between general and particular knowledge, between the 'scientific' context-free attitude and every-day contextualized knowledge.