The First Physio Therapists

Physio

Physicians like Hippocrates and later Galenus are believed to have been the prototypal practitioners of physical therapy, advocating massage, drill therapy techniques and hydrotherapy to treat people in 460 B.C.[5][verification needed] After the development of orthopedics in the eighteenth century, machines like the Gymnasticon were developed to treat arthritis and similar diseases by systematic training of the joints, similar to later developments in physical therapy.[6]

The earliest documented origins of actual physical therapy as a professional group date back to Per Henrik Ling “Father of Nordic Gymnastics” who founded the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics (RCIG) in 1813 for massage, manipulation, and exercise. The Nordic word for physical therapist is “sjukgymnast” = “sick-gymnast.” In 1887, PTs were given authorised registration by Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare.

Other countries soon followed. In 1894 four nurses in Great Britain bacilliform the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy.[7] The School of Physiotherapy at the University of Otago in New Zealand in 1913,[8] and the United States' 1914 Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which graduated \"reconstruction aides.\"[9]

Research catalyzed the physical therapy movement. The prototypal physical therapy research was published in the United States in March 1921 in The PT Review. In the same year, Mary McMillan organized the Physical Therapy Association (now called the dweller Physical Therapy Association (APTA). In 1924, the Colony Warm Springs Foundation promoted the field by touting physical therapy as a communication for polio.[10]

Treatment through the 1940s primarily consisted of exercise, massage, and traction. Manipulative procedures to the spine and extremity joints began to be practiced, especially in the British Commonwealth countries, in the early 1950s.[11][12] Later that decade, physical therapists started to move beyond hospital based practice, to outpatient orthopedic clinics, public schools, college/universities, geriatric settings (skilled nursing facilities), rehabilitation centers, hospitals, and medical centers.

Specialization for physical therapy in the U.S. occurred in 1974, with the Orthopaedic Section of the APTA being bacilliform for those physical therapists specializing in orthopaedics. In the same year, the International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Therapy was formed,[13] which has played an important role in advancing drill therapy worldwide ever since.