Physical and Rehabilitative Medicine or Physiatry is growing in people’s needs and in its health and social-health response. However, in order to cope with this development to which many other disciplines aspire, it needs to reaffirm its scientific identity: its specificity and not only its versatility, its depth and not only its breadth, its biomedical roots and not only its social horizon.
The SIMFER Congress 2021 will make of the scientific identity its leading motive. New technologies, from robotics to virtual reality, from instrumental diagnostic procedures up to minimally invasive interventional activities will be considered in a wide scientific, biological, ethical and humanistic cultural framework through lectures and thematic sessions involving participants with qualified contributions. The same will apply to established techniques such as electromyography, the study of mineral metabolism, semi-invasive infiltration and neuromodulation procedures.
These proposals will be filtered by a critical evaluation that will highlight advantages and limitations when they are considered not for their own sake, but for the purpose of integration in functional diagnoses and treatments typical of physiatry such as motor and cognitive exercise. The Congress does not want to be an expositive container of technologies that can be applied in Physiatry, but rather a guiding thread that helps the Physiatrist – in particular the young Physiatrist – to orient himself in his training choices and in the critical evaluation of the continuously emerging technological proposals while remaining attentive to his own professional specificity.
For this reason, the Congress will give as much space to lectures and interventions of the participants with explicit methodological content: on experimental design, psychometric statistics, bibliometrics and “evidence-based medicine” when they intersect with Physiatry. Milan could not be a more suitable venue for this program. From the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio to the new skyline, passing by the Duomo, the Castello Sforzesco, the Ca’Granda, the Spanish walls up to the city of industrial reconstruction, Expo and the next technological and health poles, European and Italian history run through the veins of this metropolis that was the first in the Western world to face the COVID-19 pandemic.
Milan represents an extraordinary example of industriousness, hospitality, resilience and capacity for innovation consistent with a tenacious historical and cultural tradition. Many of the roots of the Italian future and also those of its physiatry really pass through here.
SIMFER National Congress website: http://www.congressonazionalesimfer.it/
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