The practices of body in rehabilitation after stroke: a qualitative study of how physiotherapy affects identity reconstruction

Background: The rehabilitation process after a stroke transits through different treatment options organised in different settings, which thereby structure the patient’s possibilities for constructing identity. Aim: To investigate how physiotherapy located in hospitals, municipal rehabilitation, and private clinics during rehabilitation after stroke provide different practices related to the patient body and how this creates different and opposed positions for construction identity after stroke. Design and methods: A qualitative longitudinal study based on empirical data that followed 12 patients with stroke through their rehabilitation, consisted of observations of interactions between physiotherapists and patients, as well as individual in-depth interviews with physiotherapists and patients. Result: Building on Bourdieu’s notions of field, capital, and habitus, different bodily habitus seemed to work as capital throughout the rehabilitation process. Positions available for habitus were around the disembodied body, the malfunctioning body, the defective body, the remodelled body, and the body altered. These different bodies interwove and shifted across the different sites and phases of the patient’s rehabilitation. Conclusion: The relations between patients, physiotherapists and field constructed different bodily positions in the physiotherapeutic practice, where some bodies were included while other bodies were excluded. This shaped varying practices and different potentials for the patients’ identity reconstruction.