Category: Writings

Floyd Collins’ perfect willingness to dive into dark, wet, slender holes in the earth is not something to which we can all relate. But in 1925, the caves of central Kentucky provided a steady livelihood that the land’s surface could only fitfully ensure, what with the uncertainty of the weather and market prices. Floyd knew that the caves were a… Read more →

My son Alex is now thirteen and these days I watch him and his friends on the basketball team. They are the kind of gangly bunch I remember being a part of at that age. I especially remember how much I wanted more size, and how the gaze of any girl could really alter my posture. Early in this century… Read more →

The term “flexibility” we commonly use in physical therapy means not only the quantity of movement available in a joint or group of joints but usually implies an easy excursion of periarticular structures in response to active or passive motion. In orthopaedics, establishing normal flexibility is commonly the goal of care when evaluation reveals a loss of normal, painless joint… Read more →

There is a poem by William Stafford(1) entitled “Turn Over Your Hand” that begins: Those lines on your palm,they can be read for a hidden part of your life that only those links can say nobody’s voice can find so tiny a message as comes across your hand. Manual care in physical therapy today has evolved into a complex variety… Read more →

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. Richard Powers in The Gold Bug Variations In 1960, using newly developed computer technology, a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz proved that… Read more →

Tell me if this sounds familiar: A young orthopaedist who has been practicing for about five years walks up to his secretary and says, “If you let one more backache in here, you’re fired”. I begin this story to my classes by saying that when the doctor started out he was glad to see anything remotely related to his training.… Read more →

Bibliography Order Out of Chaos Man’s New Dialogue with Nature by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers. Bantam Books, 1984 An Eye for Fractals A Graphic & Photographic Essay by Michael McGuire. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1991 The Beauty of Fractals Images of Complex Dynamical Systems by H.O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 1986 Fractals – The Patterns of Chaos… Read more →

There are PTs in this country who never use their hands to manipulate, never measure muscle strength or range of motion, never employ electrical or thermal modalities for pain relief. Still, these therapists “move” their patients, encourage hard and sometimes painful work, and are often a catalyst for change in rehabilitation that is profound and persistent. Their methods of care… Read more →

In “The Physical Therapy Forum” The “Somatic Therapies-Where Do PT’s Fit In?” Vol. IV No. 23 June 12, 1985 pgs. 6, 7 “Adverse Mechanical Tension Within the C.N.S.” Clinical Implications and Management Vol. IV No. 43 October 30, 1985 “The Use of Simple Contact” Vol. VII No. 16 April 18, 1988 “Persistent Pain and Underlying Processes” Vol. VII No. 25… Read more →