Technical opinion essays by Prof. Dr. Ricardo Wallace on physiotherapy, expert witness work, ergonomics and health. Each one has open references and can be downloaded as an article. Summaries in English; full texts and PDFs in Portuguese.
Original title: Doença ocupacional de atletas
Athletes choose their profession, but not their workload: volume, intensity and calendar are set by their employer. If a repeated sports movement causes illness, is it an occupational disease? Is there a causal or contributing link? And how can the load that caused it be measured?
Original title: Na realidade, é laudo ou parecer?
As court expert, as legal consultant and as independent auditor, the same professional produces technical documents of different kinds. What distinguishes them is not content or title, but who requests them and under which regime — and the MRI “report” is, strictly speaking, a descriptive account.
Original title: O movimento também tem dose
No drug should be prescribed without a package insert; no physiotherapy technique should be applied without explicit criteria for indication, risk and dose. A reflection on evidence-based practice and on what the law expects from those who do not pursue it.
Original title: A dieta humana: evidentemente óbvio
Nobody can see a gram of protein or feel a glycaemic index. But anyone can count their own teeth, know where plants grow and notice that humans do not eat predators. Three independent witnesses tell the same story.
Original title: Fisioterapia não é sessão
“How many sessions?” is the wrong question. The right one is: which outcome, in how much time and through which plan. A reflection on fee-for-service logic and a proposal to value episodes of care qualified by the ICF.
Original title: “Medicina” do Estilo de Vida?
The content of so-called Lifestyle Medicine is largely indisputable. What deserves critical examination is the name — and what it tells the public about who leads this kind of care.
Original title: Corpo inadequado × agentes estressores
Is the rise in stress-related disease due to more stressors or to bodies less able to cope with them? The answer runs through allostatic load, muscle as an endocrine organ and an uncomfortable conclusion: the host’s condition defines the size of the damage.
Original title: O fim da ergonomia (como a conhecemos)
When the answer to overload is no longer to fit the workstation to the person but to replace the person with a machine, what is left for ergonomics — and for expert work? A provocation revisited in light of large-scale automation and Brazil’s new psychosocial risk rules (NR-1).
