Laura Rathbone - Phenomenology: The Body As A Place Of Knowing

About: Phenomenology is both a philosophy of consciousness and a movement within philosophy to reject the mind-body dualism of Descartes that has dominated within science, healthcare and culture for several hundred years. In recent years, healthcare professionals are leaning more and more towards dismantling biomedical dualism in favor of embodied ways of understanding human health and illness.
Phenomenology is an exciting philosophical perspective that can help us to radically challenge our ways of knowing in order to rebuild more progressive models of care for the future.
Citations:
Kiverstein, J., Kirchhoff, M.D. and Thacker, M., 2022. An Embodied Predictive Processing Theory of Pain Experience. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, pp.1-26.
Stilwell, P. and Harman, K., 2019. An enactive approach to pain: beyond the biopsychosocial model. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(4), pp.637-665.
Coninx, S. and Stilwell, P., 2021. Pain and the field of affordances: an enactive approach to acute and chronic pain. Synthese, 199(3), pp.7835-7863.
Kiverstein, J. and Van Dijk, L., 2021. Language without representation: Gibson's first-and second-hand perception on a pragmatic continuum. Language Sciences, 85, p.101380.
Carel, H., 2021. Pathology as a Phenomenological tool. Continental Philosophy Review, 54(2), pp.201-217.
Laura Rathbone is fascinated and dedicated to sharing the science and philosophy of pain with the aim of supporting more clinicians to work with an evidence-based whole-person approach when supporting people experiencing pain.
She is a qualified Physiotherapist and completed her MSc in Advanced Neuromusculoskeletal Physiotherapy at Kings' College, London where she explored the philosophy and complexity of pain. Laura worked across multiple MSK settings before joining a specialist tertiary pain management unit in one of the UK's top hospitals.
She now supports people with pain and clinicians working with pain from all over the world, teaches courses on integrated approaches to MSK therapy and guest lectures at universities in the UK and the Netherlands.
She qualified as a Journalist before studying Physiotherapy, where she became deeply interested in language, communication and society. Laura brings this interest and these skills to her work to produce a podcast called 'Philosophers Chatting with Clinicians' and founded the international reading community 'Pain Geeks'.