Sensing, listening, understanding - Shared decision making as mutual interaction

Abstract

Shared decision making is important to strengthen care for the individual patient, but requires that the problems can be identified, and that knowledge of good treatment exists. Communication skills are essential. Physiotherapy often unfolds in immediate and unpredictable interaction, where much is implicit, irrational, and vulnerable. This emphasizes sensuous attention and the common search for meaning. The article explores what physiotherapists can learn from artistic processes about communication skills that can strengthen the patient's opportunities to unfold and express themselves on their own terms. Theory of sensation, resonance, and ethics highlights the potential of aesthetic forms of knowledge to stimulate sensitivity to what is not directly accessible through rational concepts; the art of sensing, listening and understanding in mutual interaction that opens space. Such creative processes, in concrete interaction between actors, emphasize creative and democratic potentials in communication, relationship, and interaction. This competence can strengthen shared decision making in clinical physiotherapy, by daring to let oneself be controlled and to interact with the patient's expression in movements, tone, rhythm, and narrative, together with professional knowledge and practical skill competence. The patient's immediate co-creative contribution can then make the treatment feel significant and relevant, an invaluable efficient resource.

Keywords

• shared decision making
• communication skills
• artistic processes
• sensation
• resonance
• and ethics