No ordinary man

11/2/2009

The New Zealand School of Physiotherapists national conference was held in Dunedin in the latter half of last year with one of its keynote speakers being Stanley Paris (1952-55).

We've featured Stanley a couple of times on the website over the last year as he trained to become the oldest person to swim the English Channel. While he was in Dunedin for the conference, Stanley spoke to Rebecca Tansley from the University of Otago's magazine, whose editor Karen Hogg, married to Ian Hogg (1969-73), has given the Foundation permission to reproduce the following story:

It’s autumn in Dunedin and Stanley Paris sleeps on top of his blankets with the windows open. He happily spends hours standing in the sea, reading a book. And, if he’s not sweating in the cool air-conditioned comfort of a cinema, he’s disappointed.

Stanley Paris is no ordinary man. At the usually tender age of 70, the American-based physiotherapist recently attempted to become the oldest person to swim the English Channel. His first effort wasn’t successful and a second attempt was called off due to poor weather. While Stanley isn’t particularly interested in the glory that comes with success, he does concede it would be nice if some of its lustre rubbed off on his profession, which he credits with providing him with the skills and knowledge he has utilised in his training.

In an interview for the October 2008 edition of the University of Otago magazine, three months prior to his dual attempt, there was the impression he was more focused on failure and what it can teach us.

“I think failure is wonderful,” he said.

Stanley Paris (1952-1955)

“The only way you fail is by doing something you haven’t done before. So it’s fine to fail. It’s what you do with failure that counts. I failed anatomy and I’m pleased, because I had to repeat it and I got a passion for it then.”

After graduating from the University’s School of Physiotherapy, Stanley went on to research spinal manipulation in London. He returned to a teaching post in Dunedin, but in 1966 immigrated to the United States to undertake a PhD – in anatomy. His subsequent CV is about as far from failure as one can get.

Twice appointed physiotherapist to the New Zealand Olympic team and once to its Commonwealth Games team, Paris is himself an accomplished athlete who has swum the English Channel twice, completed the Atlanta Boston Marathon and the Hawaii World Championship iron man triathlon. He has sailed around the world, won line honours in the trans-Atlantic race from Spain to St Lucia, and set a point-to-point speed record across the Indian subcontinent in a Volkswagen Beetle named Dreadnought (named after a ship in Admiral Nelson’s navy).

That’s in his spare time.

In his professional life he took an entrepreneurial leap, in 1979, from faculty positions at Boston and Emory Universities to establish his own university, the University of St Augustine, in Florida. The institution now boasts three campuses, is the United States’ largest provider of physical therapy programmes and its third largest provider of occupational therapy courses.

Stanley’s motivation for this landmark achievement lies with his other passion: autonomy, the drive for which fuels his personal achievements, as well as his professional.

“When I trained here in Dunedin, physicians sent patients to us and told us what to do. They prescribed treatment and we were technicians. But today our professional knowledge is so extensive that no physician could reasonably tell a physiotherapist what to do. I often say that the average physician is in the business of differential diagnosis and treatment of disease, whereas a physiotherapist is in the business of differential diagnosis and treatment of dysfunction. Medicine and surgery may save lives, but no profession will speak to the quality of that life better than physical therapy.”

His frustration of physiotherapy’s subordination to the medical profession, and the resulting resistance to professional and postgraduate specialisation, Stanley established the North American Academy of Manipulation Therapy in the 1970s to provide a forum for clinical specialisation outside the national association.

In 1979 he gained a licence to confer Master of Health degrees. Six years later he bought an old hospital in Florida with money he’d made in private education, and the University of St Augustine, a for-profit, private university – part of the biggest growth area in the American tertiary education sector – was born.

Although he recently relinquished the position of president at St Augustine, Stanley remains closely involved and he is looking forward to undertaking further research in spinal neuro-anatomy. He also plans to open St Augustine’s fourth campus, in New Zealand or Australia, in 2011 to provide postgraduate physiotherapy qualifications and exchange opportunities for students from both sides of the Pacific.

“I believe in continuous quality improvement, that things can always be better. When you look at history, nothing’s the same, so do you wait for it to happen or are you one of the people that make 15 it happen? I prefer to be one of the people that make it happen.”

Stanley followed his father, who was a private practitioner in Dunedin, into physiotherapy, making the pair the first father and son to graduate from the New Zealand school. As a young man, his interest in back pain was sparked when he accidentally manipulated a patient’s spine and effected an instant recovery – at the time a misdemeanour for which he was disciplined.

He believes physiotherapy’s most important function is the maintenance of physical performance.

“We’re living longer so we’ve got to maintain our health. When I was born my life expectancy was 65, but kids being born now have a life expectancy in their 80s. We’ve got to look at the quality of those lives. You may opt to have artificial knees or hips, but that’s not the way we as a profession want it to be. We believe we can improve the quality of life, save on health-care dollars and prevent surgery through timely physiotherapy interventions with follow-up ‘booster’ sessions. We just have to prove that.”

He points to research currently being undertaken [both at the University of Otago and] at St Augustine into the long-term cost-effectiveness of physiotherapy as an alternative to surgery, but also believes that people need to start taking more responsibility for their health care.

Stanley has been committed to swimming the channel since he was 13, when he heard the then Governor-General, Lord Bernard Freyberg, address Otago Boys’ High School in 1952. Freyberg had been awarded a DSO for his courage at Gallipoli, where he swam several miles ashore to create a diversion intended to draw enemy fire while troops landed elsewhere. He was also awarded the Victoria Cross.

Yet Stanley, as a third former, recalls being impressed most by Freyberg’s humility.

“After [the wars] he tried twice to swim the English Channel,” be recalls.

“Here’s the Governor-General, decorated in the First World War, who fought alongside Montgomery in Africa in the Second World War, and what does he speak to our school about? About his ‘failures in life’, among which were his two attempts to swim the English Channel. I turned to my friend and I said to him, ‘I’ll do that one day’.”

He did too – twice. While his most recent efforts failed, Stanley says he will likely participate in relays across the channel, but will not return for a solo crossing.

His recent campaign also raised $50,000 for rehabilitation research and “the media have picked up on the story of this 70-year-old who refuses to take life easy just because of his age”.

What’s more important, Stanley believes, is that he gave it his best shot. Particularly in a society which is unhealthily obsessed with winning.