Making people do things they don’t feel like doing, while they’re exhausted, and it’s probably going to hurt. It’s no wonder us physios get the fun name of physio-terrorists.

In writing anything about Guillain-Barré syndrome, or GBS, it’s important to know just how serious a condition it is.

It was another day of emergency response. Teaming up with Harri, the occupational therapist, we were called out to a lady who was reported to be ‘hanging off the edge of her sofa.’ The lady was called Ada, and she was 100 years old. Easy-peasy one. We’re just the therapists for the case.

It was a freezing cold November afternoon, and I was driving to my last visit of the day. Get this done, write my notes, go home and warm up. Most likely with a takeaway. I was starving. The patient I was about to see was a lady with dementia, called Cynthia, who’d recently been discharged from hospital. Her mobility had suffered due to illness. Our aim was to try and build up her exercise tolerance, all while her husband, Dennis, took care of her in her recovery.

What do men need when they struggle to meet the demands that life makes of them? It could be plucking up the courage to speak to their GP. Seeking talking therapies. Or it could simply be a bit of timeout. This crazy bit of scientific history is about how men were prescribed fun and hard work to feel better.

Please, please, please listen. I’ve got one or two things to say.

After a quiet start to the day, a call reached our triager. A lady, with MS, who I will refer to as Sue, said that she could no longer walk and hadn’t moved from the sofa for the last month.

Everyone just got their heads down, looked kind of busy, but with their cameras left on. I thought, I may as well do a bit of work then. As it turned out, that was exactly what I was meant to do. Work! I got more done in those 45 minutes than I’d done all week.

13 other faces greeted me on Zoom. A couple were at the same level as me, which was nice. In fact, one was an NHS Nurse who had just had enough. The course leader, Maggie Richards, was excellent. She taught us exactly what it was, what qualities were needed, and put these into context with examples.

“Here's a red-letter date in the history of science: November 5th, 1955. Yes! Of course! November 5th, 1955! That was the day I invented time-travel. I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the sink, and when I came to I had a revelation! A vision! A picture in my head! A picture of this!”