Select your language
The Bugnet method has been applied in the Netherlands since 1948, after being introduced to the Netherlands by Madame Bugnet.
Madame Th. Bugnet-van der Voort was born Dutch and married the Frenchman Bugnet. She obtained her kinetic therapy diploma in France and started building up a system of exercises with so-called 'auto-résistance' in her physiotherapy practice. These were exercises in which the patient provided (increased to maximum) the resistance himself. She got the idea from a book by S. Bennett: “Old age its cause and prevention “(1936). While treating patients in her practice, Madame Bugnet applied muscular manipulation and other resistances during these 'auto-résistance exercises'. And so she arrived at a new method of treatment in an experimental manner.
The success of this method, that she also called neuromyotherapy, was difficult to explain at that time.
M. van G., born in 1945, contracted polio just before her first birthday. She was the first Bugnet patiënt in the Netherlands. M. van G. studied theology and music and had a working life in both areas. She is married with two daughters.
The book about Bugnet has been dedicated to the ‘I' in the story below, "because her positive reaction to the Bugnet treatment method has lead to the definite design of the publication".
I got polio when I was 11 months old. When I recovered from the illness I could only move my head and my right hand a little. The rest of my muscles were paralysed. Luckily my respiratory muscles were not affected.
I had a very special mother. She turned the play-pen over so that I could lie higher. I then had more contact with my sister and brothers. I was the fifth child in a family of six children. When my youngest brother was born, my mother was glad that he wasn't a girl because I could see myself as myself and not make a comparison...