FROM WRECK COVE TO OTTAWA
Cape Breton woman works as a university researcher.
It seems ironic that one of Canada’s foremost hand therapists and researchers on the body’s upper extremities would be nursing a sore finger during the final days of her summer holiday in Cape Breton.
“I was having a very good vacation until a day or two ago when I jammed my finger,” said Joy Christine Macdermid, B.Sc. PT, M.Sc., PhD, in a recent phone interview.
The Wreck Cove native has been vacationing at her cottage in Florence over the past few weeks and she tries to get home to Cape Breton as often as she can, where many members of her family still live. Eventually she plans to retire here.
But when she’s not here relaxing, she can be found in London, Ont., where she is a faculty member at the University of Western Ontario. She is codirector of the clinical research lab within the Roth | McFarlane Hand and Upper Limb Centre and also an associate professor (School of Rehabilitation Science) at McMaster University. She is crossappointed to departments of surgery and epidemiology at both McMaster and Western universities.
And you could go on and on — Macdermid has a 176-page curriculum vitae that is filled with accomplishments, honours and citations that are the result of years of research and hard work in her field.
Her research projects address clinical questions related to enhancing prevention, assessment and management of musculoskeletal disorders and related work disability.
Her specific research interests include understanding factors that contribute to upper extremity disability surgery and rehabilitation intervention effectiveness, randomized clinical trials/trial methodology, cohort outcomes studies, psychometrics of clinical measurement (performance or self-report, measures of pain/ disability/quality-of-life), clinical epidemiology, clinical practice guidelines, and knowledge transfer.
Macdermid became interested in physiotherapy just after graduating from St. Mary’s University with a biology degree. She met some physiotherapists while working as a research assistant at a physiology lab at Dalhousie University and became fascinated.
“I became interested in it and found out what people did and decided I wanted to go to school for that,” she said. “I applied and ended up going to the University of Western Ontario. I knew when I went into physio that I was interested in research so I picked Western because it had a master’s program. I worked for a while in physio and became interested in upper extremities and specialized in upper limbs
disorders as a hand therapist.”
She knew she wanted to be a researcher so she eventually earned her PhD in epidemiology. She was a professor at MacMaster University from 2001-15 and then she came back to the University of Western Ontario as a professor in the School of Physical Therapy with two research chairs, the James Roth Research Chair in Musculoskeletal Measurement and Knowledge Translation and Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Gender, Work and Health — Muscle and Tone.
She has about 15 masters and PhD students working with her at all times on various research projects including one project that is comparing pain relief experienced when patients take over-the-counter drugs as opposed to narcotics that are presently being used. Another group of studies look at the outcomes of joint replacements while other studies examine how males and females differ in terms of their rehabilitation.
“I have a number of research projects going on at all times — they focus mainly on musculoskeletal disability, people who have problems with nerves, bones and joints, whether it’s arthritis or an injury — looking at ways of rehabilitating,” she said, adding that some groups, such as firefighters are studied since they experience a lot of injuries and research may lead to ways to help them avoid those injuries.
“After treating patients for a few years, you start to see that there’s many questions you don’t know,” Macdermid said. “Your clinical questions lead on to your research questions.
“I certainly enjoy doing research.”