Physio-Political ... musings, songs and dances...

Just as the weekend dawned I shared Hodges' model as a loop-the-loop when it comes to interdisciplinary crossover and cross-fertilization. In that post I ventured that PHYSIO-POLITICAL is probably the one that is least familiar in health. What do you think - the four candidates being -

SOCIO-POLITICAL
PSYCHO-SOCIAL
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL
PHYSIO-POLITICAL?

If I had to justify PHYSIO-POLITICAL as least familiar, it is one of the most obvious individually; in that if you lose your freedom of movement, or freedom of expression and self-determination you are going to make a real (rather on-the-spot) song and dance about it.

Perhaps this is why it is only in the past few decades that disability rights and disabled access have come to fore in health and social care and government policies and law. There is also a realisation with ageing populations the extent to which PHYSIO-POLITICAL impacts on our quality of life. If you cannot transfer from chair to toilet let alone walk - that spells 'trouble'. This is a double-whammy when allied with the PSYCHO-PHYSICAL, suddenly cognitive abilities also enter the frame.

The 'PSYCHO-PHYSICAL' is mentioned in Gardenfor's book Conceptual Spaces (more on that to follow too), which set me to wonder that each of these disciplinary fields needs to be revisited regularly in policy terms. For example, bound within the socio-political is economics with the problem of poverty ever present in the news.

For individuals with learning disability from a psycho-physical perspective they may be further compromised with the social emphasis on visual, health and ICT literacies and the information society plus a reduction in the meaningful activities they can pursue. This is a difficult debate (raised in the literature I notice), but one that needs to be addressed.

If people also lack the mental capacity - PSYCHO-POLITICAL - to make decisions for themselves then PHYSIO-POLITICALLY speaking they will depend on others to make that song and dance on their behalf.

(I never expected to get so caught up with hyphens - weird that - when I originally selected the domain name for the website over a decade ago I used a hyphen. ...)