Día Mundial de la Fisioterapia

Physiotherapy has thousands of years of evolution but only in 1958 did the World Health Organization officially define physiotherapy as “the art and science of treatment through therapeutic exercise, heat, cold, light, water, massage and electricity.” In addition to treatments, in physiotherapy, manual and computerized tests are used to determine the affectation and the degree of all those who come to this service, such as muscle strength, joint movement, balance, pain, among others. So what has been known as the treatment through physical agents has evolved not only curative but also preventive and evaluative skills.

As in medicine, in the nineteenth century, physiotherapy is divided into several therapeutic specialties in which we can find neurological physiotherapy. Neurological physiotherapy, as a service incorporated in the neurorehabilitation sector, aims to restore and maintain functional capacities to the maximum affected by the neurological disease or injury (eg, stroke, ALS among others) and in some cases to develop new strategies and capacities that allow the people affected to be as autonomous as possible in their activities.

Within this branch of physiotherapy, neurological physiotherapy, it is possible to find different concepts, methods and treatment techniques developed mostly after the 1950s. At the Neurorehabilitation Clinic of Sant Cugat del Vallés (Barcelona), the Bobath Concept is the most integrated approach in physiotherapy treatments and even if we use different strategies, we continue to celebrate physiotherapy, where everything has started.