New therapeutic alliances

2 min read

Presentation

SASP Symposium 2026 · South African Society of Physiotherapy · 4 September 2026

Invited panel presentation

Overview

A panel session for the South African Society of Physiotherapy’s 2026 Symposium, themed Taking Physiotherapy into the Future. The panel paired two medical doctors speaking to clinical AI use with this contribution on AI in physiotherapy education and research.

The talk opens with an older claim — that smartphones and the internet would end medicine’s paternalism by putting patients in charge of their own data — and argues that AI is finishing what that claim only gestured at. AI performance on licensing-style medical exams has moved from barely passing to consistently strong in a few years, and systems like Flok Health’s Class IIa-certified MSK pathway show unsupervised AI already operating inside regulated clinical care, not just answering questions about it.

The session covers:

  • What the evidence on AI capability actually shows, and how fast it’s moved
  • Why patients arriving with AI-informed health literacy is a different, more capable version of what social media already started
  • Whether physiotherapy students are being prepared to help patients build better prompts and use AI well, rather than treating it as noise to correct
  • The research gap: nobody has measured what happens to outcomes when clinicians work with patients who were already going to consult AI regardless

It closes on what this asks of the profession: shape the AI-informed patient relationship deliberately, on evidence, rather than reacting to it or trying to gatekeep it.

Slides

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