Relevant chemistry topics for the clinical practice of a physiotherapist

Physiotherapist is a discipline whose aim is to preserve, restore, and improve the health status of individuals with motor disturbances or at risk of developing and to improve the quality of life of people and community. The aim of this article was to determine which are the most important topics of general organic and biological chemistry courses within the physiotherapist undergraduate career at the University Bernardo O´Higgins. For this purpose we followed a model of qualitative study, applied in two different groups of people: educators of the physiotherapist career (PE) and clinical physiotherapist (CP), who were asked about the importance of topics related to chemistry courses, general, organic and biological (GOB courses). Each participant must choose a category for each topic: “important”, “relevant” or “not important” for a physiotherapist clinical activity. Results show that the more frequently topics considered as “important” in both groups were from biological chemical course: proteins and its metabolism. Secondly, none of the interviewed subjects considered any of the topics of the course of organic chemistry as “important” for the clinical activity of a physiotherapist. Thus, the aim of the study is widely fulfilled and it might be concluded that future studies are required involving a larger sample size in these and other universities that will generate results for a good curricular articulation.