This extensive article reports on the history of oppression of the Indigenous Peoples of Canada, and relates their struggle to the present day—specifically, to the field of occupational therapy. Through the personal Stories of the three authors, the abstract becomes real. They bring to life the experiences of The Métis People, the Sipekne’katik First Nation, Mi’kmaq Nation, the Inuit Peoples and others, told from their own perspective as occupational therapists. Their goal is to inspire others to work toward decolonization and reconciliation throughout Canada.

How often do researchers of evidence-based treatments assess their own internal team choices and how they affect the individuals they seek to help? This author says not nearly enough. She offers a solution: she details how a team researching SCI treatments included the lived-experience perspectives of invited participants in the process. The team applied a Critical Analysis framework to their self-assessment. Their results make a powerful case for including lived experience in medical research.

This study reports on the negative impact on some NPTE candidates of seeking accessibility accommodations. The results show that requesting accommodations for testing puts an additional burden on these students, which can affect their academic, and even their professional, lives. The authors call for “improved ease of access to information,” and “a more streamlined approach nationwide” to the exam process for persons with disabilities.

This insightful and moving article argues for wider use of palliative care in end-of-life situations. Written from her personal experience with terminal patients, the author notes how, ironically, a focus on positivity can deny the much-needed comfort that palliative care provides. Contrasting a rural southern hospital and a top urban neurorehabilitation facility, she notes how her patients received more end-of-life comfort in the former. She calls for physical therapists to “advocate for better integration of palliative care principles into PT practice.”

Physical therapy has been practiced in the US for more than 100 years. But have rehabilitative services been the same for all Americans? These authors show how Black, Brown, and Indigenous People have not fully reaped the rewards of this, or any, aspect of the US healthcare system. They state that the nation’s “structural racism” continues to shape “exclusion of racialized persons from all levels of physical therapy.” They offer this article as a “first step in better understanding this history”—and in finding real solutions.