My Professional Story

If Temple University didn’t make undergraduates take a science class, I wouldn’t be writing this bio.  I was one class away from being an Urban planner. The city is beautiful, but inside you there is an even more incredible interworking of parts.  I took Anatomy and Physiology.  It became my manifesto and I followed where it took me. 

Into a Doctoral program at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, then to working in a number of clinics where I treated but didn’t find the same brilliance I initially was enamored with, sitting in an auditorium learning latin names devoting them to memory to delineate the parts of you.  Maybe that doesn’t sound as romantic as it felt at the time.  But I fell in love, and then fell out when I realized what Physical Therapy meant in practice.

Then I had a baby, and saw the most amazing things happen as he progressed through his development.  He went from a mush to a fully functioning, running human. I studied how babies learn movement, through a school called Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (DNS).  It teaches how to use your core to move the way you are designed to. Teaching how to counteract years of bad habits and gravity to restore ease and joy into movement. 

But we all grow up and become warriors in our own rights and want to squeeze the most out of our bodies.  To find that extra range of motion or extra strength, you can train each joint to reach its potential.  Functional Range Conditioning (FRC) is an incredible tool to actualize that potential and train to the highest capacity you could want to achieve, and I trained in that to better round out my skill set.

But there still seemed to be more to the human condition than how we developed and how we make each part of our body stronger and more dynamic.  I questioned why we think getting a running injury is a right of passage, or how low back pain is inevitable?  What underlying cause is there to pain with rotational sport activities, and why can some of us not even walk around the block without pain?  

Those answers evaded me for years, and I trained and rehabbed people and had varying results.  But then I found the Postural Restoration Institute (PRI).  And I started to answer some of those why questions.  Why your shoulder hurts, or why your neck hurts, or even, why your two feet look like they belong to two different people.  And as I asked more questions I found more answers which was very exciting.  But even better was finding more questions I didn’t even know how to ask.

But I was still out of love with what Physical Therapy was, and how I was told to practice in busy clinics and mandated by insurances to treat specific body parts.  I saw the whole body in my practice, and my whole attention as an important thing to give to you.  So I re-devoted myself to those goals.  

I have found that my path has made me who I am today as a clinician and as a person, and I strive to understand your history and individuality as a person and as a patient. I realize that what makes you special is not your problem, it is your potential, and that is what I am excited to actualize with you.