Biokineticist

Movement is an essential part of everyday life, depended on constantly by people of all ages. Movement affects development, learning, communicating, working, health, and quality of life. At the most basic level, movement permits people to navigate and to stay oriented within their environment. It is critical for most work and recreation and allows people to interact more fully. For these reasons, movement is a defining element of quality of life.

Movement may be diminished or lost because of heredity, aging, injury, or disease. Such loss may occur gradually, over the course of a lifetime, or traumatically in an instant.

Conditions of movement loss that are linked with chronic and disabling diseases place additional challenges for patients and their families. From the public health perspective, the prevention of either the initial impairment or additional impairment from this environmentally orienting and socially connecting functioning requires significant resources.

Prevention of movement loss or the resulting disabling conditions through the development of improved disease prevention, detection, or treatment methods or more effective rehabilitative strategies must be a global priority.

The profession of Biokinetics has evolved as a primary care health profession responding to the universal need for quality, accessible, cost-effective health care. Biokineticists are widely distributed in communities around the world; they provide economic value for the services they offer; they detect a wide spectrum of conditions at a savings to the health care system; they provide entry into the health care system for many patients who would otherwise not seek care; they prepare our children for the competitive marketplace by assuring their physical fitness and preparedness for learning and achievement; they maximize employment productivity and benefit economic stability; and they promote quality of life and individual independence, rather than more costly institutionalized and supported care.

The primary function of Biokinetics is to improve physical functioning and health care through exercise as modality.

Biokinetics is the profession concerned with health promotion, the maintenance of physical abilities and final phase rehabilitation, by means of scientifically-based physical activity programme prescription.

A Biokineticist is a clinical exercise specialist who:

• Is professionally aligned to health and medicine, and is registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA).
• Improves a person’s well-being and quality of life through providing an individualised scientific assessment and prescribes exercise in treatment for rehabilitation, and also to prevent or intervene with certain ailments (e.g. chronic disease and/or orthopaedic injury). A Biokineticist also enhances works with an individual to improve performance related to physical activities of daily living, work and sport.
• Is a health professional who creates a better quality of life through wellness and health promotion.

Source: http://www.biokinetics.org.za/