Divya Mohan
Manipal University, India
Title: Relevance of mind-body connection for a physiotherapist
Biography
Biography: Divya Mohan
Abstract
Typically, physiotherapist’s focus of practice remains pain management. Also, improvement of the movement control and skill is a common goal that the physiotherapist frequently aims to reach. These goals have traditionally been met based on the interventions derived from the understanding of the various structural pathologies or functional insufficiencies in the musculoskeletal system. This understanding can be expanded by understanding that the mind does influence the structural and functional aspects of the musculoskeletal system. Mind body approaches like biofeedback have in the past to some extent been used for the retraining of movement control by trying to retrain the mind. Also towards the management of chronic pain, this understanding has been found to be effective with approaches like relaxation strategies, meditation. But a more in-depth understanding of other mental and emotional process and their contributions to symptoms for which physiotherapy is frequently been sought, could give a physiotherapist a much larger scope in practice. There is research evidence recently that emotional regulation is also found to be useful for the pain management. Likewise, it has been proven that movement quality and performance is greatly influenced by the state of the mind. And retraining of movement skills and control for wide range of discipline like neurological, paediatric, cardiopulmonary and sports rehabilitation could use this premise. Generally, an agitated mind is associated with the poor performance and deterioration of subtle movement qualities like flow, timing, sequencing and thereby impacting its precision, and efficiency. Whereas a better regulated mind can produce smoother and well controlled movement. For example, tone a variable influencing movement also frequently shows variation to mental effort, level of challenge, stress, excessive emotionality, fear of failure, familiarity of task, enthusiasm, and motivation. Hence understanding of the mind-body relations and interactions could assist the physiotherapist to move a step further in management strategies. Hence the talk intends to explore and discuss the ideas around mind-body connection and its relevance to physiotherapists.