About me
Hi, I’m Vicenç Punsola, I’ve been a physiotherapist since 1996 and a passionate of the hands.
I’m passionate about hand therapy. In this specialty, we must strive for excellence. When the available means don’t give you the expected results, you have to be creative and develop new techniques.
Professional needs led me to study manual therapy and pain management. I combined my knowledge with my beliefs, and MAPS Therapy was born. It’s a meeting point between hand therapy, design, and research. If you’d like, I can explain how it all came about.
PLAYING MECCANO
Since I was young, I knew that I wanted to be a physiotherapist, I was passionate about mechanics and assemblies like Lego but also building kits to play with, I really enjoyed all types of DIY hand crafts, but I never imagined that my career would lead me to use this knowledge.
ENJOYING ANATOMY
At the university, one of my favourite subjects was the one that nobody loved: anatomy. I loved discovering the shapes and movements of the human body, I found it fascinating to understand it and to be able to observe it in people.
LOOKING FOR QUALITY
At the beginning of my professional career, I was interested in quality services and it was difficult for me to understand why professionals did not always seek excellence. Three days after finishing my degree, I went to France where I discovered hand therapy.
STARTING HAND THERAPY
At the end of the nineties, when I started working in hand therapy, this specialty was non-existent in Spain and due to the employment situation, many of the tools that I needed for the treatments were not available.
MANUAL THERAPY
As a physical therapist, I worked diligently to learn manual therapy techniques to help my patients, but I quickly realized that these techniques had little application in hand therapy and hardly gave satisfactory results.
STIFFNESS AND PAIN
One of the main difficulties I found in my hand patients was the presence of stiffness and pain, and manual therapy for that cases had little capability of modification. The key to work on stiffness was to increase the work time and at the same time, the key to pain management was to control the intensity. But how could I have more time if I saw 4 patients every hour? And how could I reduce the resistance of tissues if rigidity was so important?
THE IDEAL TECHNOLOGY
For years I was looking for the technology that would allow me to improve the treatment of my patients to generate more durable and tolerable mobilization techniques.
MECANOTHERAPY AND THE CANADIAN PEGBOARD
In hand therapy we had a device called the Canadian pegboard for which there was no described work methodology but which allowed the patient’s hand to be held to perform exercises without the need for the therapist to be with him permanently.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPEMENT
I built my first tables in my home workshop, with them I was able to see how I was able to increase the patient’s work time, which in turn I saw that it was the patient who managed the intensities of the treatment, learning to understand and control pain.
MAPS METHOD
At the beginning I had the described a few exercises but with the experience of years and treating thousands of patients I developed techniques that allowed me to approach more and more structures. At the same time, I was able to develop the progressive and sequential analytical mobilization techniques “the MAPS technique” that grew for more than 10 years while I was training with this methodology.
THE MAPS KITS
At one point I realized that the devices available on the market did not provide an outlet for the technical needs that were generated. As soon as I proposed changing the format of the board with the precision zone, I saw that it would be impossible to find kits like the ones I wanted on the market. It was then that I decided to embark on an adventure with my own company.
MAPS THERAPY WAS BORN.
Thanks to years of study, teaching and clinical practice in hand therapy, I began to create accessories that modified the tool and I started creating different Kits with different therapeutic objectives. Initially the tables in 2D evolved, to later move to the tables in 3D and finally the devices for combined work of mechanotherapy and BTR manual therapy.
CLINICAL REASONING
As the years have gone by, other concepts have come to give more support and evidence to the developed method. The DASE system is an arsenal of knowledge that enables you to be more assertive in mechanical diagnosis, provides you with sufficient anticipation to minimize secondary effects and provides the necessary security to accurately execute all mobilization techniques.
MAPS PLATFORM
Now, with more than 10 years in the market, MAPS Therapy is positioned as the only hand therapy platform with its own training method based on the DASE system of clinical reasoning. Pioneers in treatment with mechanotherapy and with an R&D department at Hand Therapy Barcelona, the clinic where all our Pegboard kits are tested before going on the market.
THE RESULTS
Since then, at a clinical level, me and my team of therapists at Hand Therapy Barcelona have been managing to address alterations that we have never been able to treat decisively until now. We work to give evidence to the treatment we apply.
At the teaching level we have managed to reach professionals from the five continents and we are progressively expanding the map of MAPS therapists who are becoming benchmarks in the sector.
MAPS Therapy is the technology in hand therapy that makes the movement flow. We bring specialist treatment closer so that many more people around the world can benefit from quality hand therapy.
