About me: The Curiouser

Hi all

I share a rare passion, a desire and a dream to understanding more about how the human body works, how we move, how it repairs and how our behaviors and emotions can influence these processes. can be represented as an integral part of an ecological worldview. That humans are not positioned as a superior being in the world, but share a harmony with the world.
This is my first updated blog, I’m not gonna sit here and talk all about me (well a little bit) I’m gonna get straight into the nitty-gritty and tell you why I’m doing this.

My background has always been in sport, I loved being in the outdoors and there wasn’t something that I wanted to try from team sports to hanging upside down from cliff walls, running across the wilderness to sailing on the open ocean.  It certainly gave me the desire to understand more about the human body, how it moves, its reactions, what we need to fuel it, how it survives and most interestingly how the brain and nervous system regulate it.

My first ever injury was the classic hamstring strain on the football pitch.  I wanted to know more about how I could avoid re-injury, what I needed to do from an exercise perspective and even as far as to know what the right food was to benefit performance.  Back in the day where the magic sponge was the treatment of choice, I was intrigued by why sometimes it worked and a quick cooling of the limb helped and why others it didn’t?  This intrigued me, was I faking it for attention or was it a fancy hormone called adrenalin or was it my P.E teacher telling me to man up saying to me, “get up it’s only pain laddie!” (I grew up in Scotland).

These and other questions inspired me to pursue a career into physiotherapy and in that I became increasingly interested in Pain Science, maintaining my interest in health and exercise.

I didn’t stop there, clinical experience really began to open my eyes to the scarcity of textbook examples physiotherapy really had….This intrigued me more and confused me more…… Like why do some people scream out in complete agony (and their pain is very real to them!) with minimal tissue injury and others complain of minimal symptoms but can have sustained very severe injuries (according to the textbook).  I began to bury my head in research and attend professional courses to understand further.

Finding this research was easy the amount that was available was overwhelming.  The internet is the worlds biggest resource folder, type what you want into search engines and you will receive a mountain of information from research, evidence based medicine, academia, clinical experience, professional opinions, anecdotes and if you’re not savvy a whole heap of bullshit and pseudoscience!

When I first became a clinician I believed I could change lives, this is still my belief today, yet I became frustrated very quickly. As a student my expectations of what I had been taught were not met. This is still the case today. Some people got better, others didn’t. This is still the same today. I suffered burn out, which was made all the worse when I would ask my colleagues for help but they couldn’t offer an alternative to what I already knew.

Physiotherapy held a dark side that was toxic! Poisoned by dogma, experiential viewpoints, confirmation biases, hierarchical pissing contests and bandwagon effects! This is still the same today. I had to start thinking differently, creatively, but before all that I had to figure out how. This journey lead me down a path of personal and professional discovery to why I am, who I am today. Someone who wants to share that discovery with you.

More recently, a path has opened up into understanding philosophical presuppositions and assumptions, and how they provide a foundation of enquiry that the scientific method is unable to penetrate. My reading has drawn me deeply into understanding the concept of curiosity and its ubiquity in understanding the world and worldviews.

This has led me here.  My own blog where people like you can come and read, share, be educated, generate discussions and hopefully be reassured that the information you will get will be cutting edge and not pseudo science bullshit.  That what you read is the latest evidence shared by me and other professionals who share the same passion.

So if you like what you read, tell your friends. If you don’t, then please tell me .

Come join me in the buff!

Paul  Lagerman BSc PG Cert NZRP (aka TNP)

Physiotherapist and Curiouser