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To your question above, if a light manual contact is enough to encourage increased effortless movement and awareness of the movement, why would that not be the "preferable way of facilitating 'ideomotion'? (gilbert)
Yes, why not?
If a coerced/choreographed movement is done by the patient and/or the therapist, is the evidence of its usefulness shown to be better than eliciting ideomotion?
To your question above, if a light manual contact is enough to encourage increased effortless movement and awareness of the movement, why would that not be the "preferable way of facilitating 'ideomotion'? (gilbert)
Yes, why not?
If a coerced/choreographed movement is done by the patient and/or the therapist, is the evidence of its usefulness shown to be better than eliciting ideomotion?
And as far as I know, we don't have any evidence comparing the usefulness of these three broad approaches for catalyzing this altered motor output. We don't even know if the altered motor output precedes or follows decreases in a pain experience (since it's likely cyclical).
The argument for non coercive touch is based on the assumption that lighter touch ensures that greater locus of control stays with the patient. I disagree with this assumption because I think the explanatory narrative is a much more powerful dictator of where the locus of control lies.
So long as a PT is providing a reasonable explanatory narrative, and he/she doesn't provide treatment that is painful or that could reasonably be assumed to be causing nociception, I think there is a defensible scope for PTs to consider his/her own preferences and the patient's preferences in deciding whether to proceed with non coercive touch, passive movement or active/conscious movement, or some combination of all three.
I get pretty tired of the implicit view that gentle, non coercive touch is the most defensible method for treating people with persistent pain. I don't see that it is. This doesn't mean I think coercive or choreographed methods are more defensible. It means that we don't know which is best for which patient, and there exists defensible scope for the use of noncoercive, passive and / or active/conscious movement interventions
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