What Is the Essence of Physical Therapy?
To the Editor: Twenty-five years ago, while giving the 10th annual Mary McMillan Lecture, Helen Hislop articulated a passionate vision for the successful future of physical therapy.[1] In this lecture, she emphasized the need for clinical research, clinical specialist certification, doctoral programs, and, above all, the need for the profession to have a “sense of its elemental identity.”[1(p1070)] I propose that progress has been made in all but the last area. Physical therapy still has the same identity crisis that it did in 1975, and a viable future hinges on its resolution. Before the profession moves on to deal with the myriad of challenges it will face in the future, it needs to be grounded in a sense of its own identity. The future of physical therapy must begin with physical therapists being aware of the essence of their profession. Such a statement may, on cursory observation, seem to be trite. However, if a group of physical therapists in a similar practice setting were surve
