A Chip On Our Shoulder, As Big As A Boulder

Glen O'Humeral

I recently observed yet another round of embarrassing disputes about professional titles, professional differences and professional respect. 😴

Sometimes someone is impersonating a Physio, sometimes someone is opening a ‘Physio job’ up to others, sometimes someone is impersonating a doctor but EVERY TIME the discussion is petty and crap.

To vaguely attempt a long story short, I’ll try to summarise the primary issue here, before weighing in with my deeply biased and grouchy opinion. You may have witnessed some of these disputes online before but passed them by assuming that they were written in a foreign language. This is because they are usually written in the ancient yet ugly language of ‘professionalese’.

Fluent professionalese speakers are dual-qualified with an NVQ level 1 in diplomacy and a PhD in passive aggression. They can pontificate for hours on social media under the illusion that people read actual essays in comments sections. Fortunately for us and for the brevity of this article, we now live in the age of AI and I was able to copy a 31,470 word sample of such a ‘debate’ into ChatGPT and asked it to summarise the shared opinion of the ‘debaters’:

• My badge is better than your badge

• My Dad is tougher than your Dad

• My degree is better than your degree

• My cock is bigger than your cock

• My regulator is better than your regulator

We can learn a lot from this AI analysis. Firstly that robots already know too much about the relative importance of our genitals. But also that we are quite the set of childish morons.

This is MSKMag by Physio Matters so I’ll hazard a guess that that the majority of readers are UK Physios; which are the middle of three categories of loser in this debate landscape:

1. Non-Physios in MSK

2. Physios

3. Doctors & Nurses

All three categories have large chips on their shoulder - and all three categories have a variety of legitimate grievances that they would say justify them - but I failed my NVQ in diplomacy and my professionalese translator is off with stress, so I will be proceeding with examples of each being insufferable whinge bags.

1. Sports Therapists, Osteopaths, Chiropractors, Kinesiologists, Sports Rehabilitators, Chiropaths, Osteopractors and Jigglypuffs manage to SIMULTANEOUSLY adore their own badge so much that they would NEVER want to be a Physio anyway whilst continually impersonating Physios when it’s convenient to do so.

2. This lot are a pain in the arse in two separate ways. When looking down (at the lowly non-Physios) and when looking up (at the folk the public and politicians care about).

- When looking down, Physios are UNBELIEVABLY precious when the Chiropath Therapists use their ‘hard earned protected title’, yet spend a grand total of FUCK ALL time policing each other on the actual care standards they’re supposedly protecting. Freedom for me, HCPC reporting for thee.

- When looking up, Physios LOVE to extend their own scope and nibble away at doc and nurse opportunities, funding and titles.

- TIP: Are you completely unqualified to be a consultant in a field where that implies decades of training and examination? Don’t sweat it, write a cushty job spec that even you and your 2:2 BSc from Slough Polytechnic meet.

- When those meany docs and nurses create jobs that Physios fancy but aren’t allowed to apply for, you think they’d at least briefly think ‘wait… isn’t this what we do to those grubby non-Physios’? But no, they’ll whinge upwards and sneer downwards.

3. You’d think that the Doctors and Nurses would be above all this. Significant brand recognition, deep political influence, decades of successfully calling 20-year-qualified registrars ‘junior’ to garner sympathy from the public. You’ve got shit going for you. BUT NO, you have a chip on your shoulder because your medical model, medicines, surgeries and tellings off don’t seem to help MSK patients particularly well. So some Physios are eating your lunch*

*Provided for by some company who have patented a new urine centrifuge which really separates off the potent anti-inflammatory £nzymes that are perfect for cytokines in the sporting labrum.

By now you’ve worked me out. I loathe you all. Your navel gazing, your hypocrisy and your whinging. But I’ll make some direct suggestions because I’m a giver.

Dear Chiropath Therpist,

The public don’t care about your title and them assuming you’re a Physio is mainly because they don’t know a lot of words. If you truly have your own identity, stop leveraging Google search terms by implying you’re a Physio. And if you ever end up with your own ‘protected title’, I hope some hairdressers who give head rubs abuse yours as much as you love to abuse Physios’.

Dear Physio,

The public don’t care about your title and if they did, they’d also care about the embarrassingly low educational standard you required to acquire it. So you’re better off keeping your head down. Oh and stop pretending the HCPC is a credible regulator of professional healthcare standards.

Dear Docs and Nurses,

The public actually care about your title but you’re kidding yourselves if you think that your reputations are being compromised by a few plucky Physios. You’d be wise to highlight the absence of any educational governance in Physio and turn your attention away from MSK where your skill set is FAR less valuable than pretty much everywhere else in healthcare. You poor juniors doctors you.

Considering how aggressively this article has already been edited, I doubt I’ll be invited to be Glen again… I did ask who to complain to and Physio Matters team told me to take it up with their head of HR: Sue Donim.

So goodbye forever, please stop whinging, stop speaking professionalese when there are literally no serious consequences for speaking your mind on this stuff and do try to grind down the massive chips on your shoulders.

Glen