My Story

I want to tell you a story, a story about how I came to be a doctor of physical therapy. I think this story will resonate with many who, like me, think that there is a better way to do healthcare and want to make a difference in your own life and in the life of those you love.

When I was in high school I was like any typical teenager, I was weird and awkward, shy and uncertain. I was sitting in my room one day playing on my gameboy when my dad came in and sat down next to me. At the time I was 16 and had just given up playing soccer because it was getting difficult to play soccer while also working part time at Quiznos and going to school. My dad asked me what I was going to do now for physical activity now that I had quit playing soccer. I told him I didn’t know that I would have to think about it. 

The answer came when registration for next year’s classes came and I saw a class called body conditioning. I thought this was great, I had heard about it before from classmates who said it was the easiest A they ever got and they would sometimes go outside and play on the football field during class. I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it a go, it’ll get my dad off my case and I’ll get an easy A out of it as well. 

On the first day of class I remember sitting on the weight room floor waiting for class to begin, I didn’t know anyone else so I sat alone. Eventually, the coach came out of his office to start the orientation. He began by immediately calling out half the class, with me included. 

“Now I know why most of you are here today,” he said “you’ve probably heard from your friends that this is an easy A, that you don’t need to work hard, and that’s true, many of you will cheat and fill out bogus numbers on your exercise cards, flirt around for an hour and get your A. But for those of you who dedicate yourselves and really strive in this class, you’ll make a lifelong change in your health, confidence and fitness”. 

I had been called out and I felt embarrassed by that. I decided that I would dedicate myself to the class and the exercises and after just a few weeks I started to notice a difference in my arms and chest, I was already starting to get more muscle and feel more energetic. My confidence also grew not only from the physical changes that came from exercise but also learning to set and achieve fitness goals. I thought to myself, man, I hope there’s a career out there that focuses on exercise and helping people get the same benefits I had just experienced.

At that time I had never even heard of physical therapy, I was thinking that personal training would work but my parents advised me to get a college education. I learned about chiropractic during a career development class and thought it might be a good fit and I could just add exercise on the side to my treatments. So for the next few years I dedicated myself to prepare for a career as a chiropractor. I found a chiropractor on Youtube who I thought was very smart and charismatic and made a lot of sense. He talked about an analogy he commonly uses with his patients about a pebble in the shoe. 

The analogy went like this: You go walking everyday with a pebble in your shoe, it starts causing mechanical stress to the bottom of your foot which causes inflammation and pain signals to be sent up to your brain. You go and see your family doctor who meets with you for about 7 minutes and prescribes you with a pain killer and sends you home. It works for a little bit but after a few weeks you notice that the pain starts coming back so your doctor prescribes you a stronger pain killer. After a few years of this your foot starts to adapt to the mechanical stress caused by the pebble, it starts getting calloused and deformed. You go back to your doctor who tells you that he’s done all he can, you’ve been on the highest pain killer he can prescribe so he refers you to a surgeon. The surgeon takes an MRI and says, yup, your foots deformed, let's cut the callus tissue off and set your foot bones with rods and screws, that’ll fix your pain. Consider for a moment if that patient had gone to a chiropractor who took off the shoe, saw there was a pebble, took out the pebble and your pain went away. 

This resonated with me, I thought “YES!” this is what healthcare should look like. I had seen family members go through exactly what this chiropractor had just described. They started with the family doctor and pain medications and eventually ended up with a painful and expensive surgery and still no meaningful relief from the pain. I had always thought that there had to be a better way and I thought I had found it. I was galvanized now, I was going to become a chiropractor and fix the world!

As I started learning more about chiropractic I learned it was started by a claim that a man had cured another man’s deafness by adjusting his neck. I then learned that there were basically two schools of chiropractors, those who believe and teach that they can cure deafness, blindness, cancer and liver disease by manipulating the spine and those who keep to what research has been able to prove and repeat. This was a test of my conviction to continue on to be a chiropractor but I still didn’t have a very good alternative so I thought I would continue on that path. As I was finishing up my junior year in college, and applications would start to open up for chiropractic schools I attended a graduate fair to look around and see what colleges were out there. For some reason the main question I asked the schools that I talked to was “what is your pass rate on your licensure exam for your graduates”? 

The first school I talked to said their pass rate was about 86%, I thought ok, not bad. The next school reported their pass rate was 67% for first time test takers and 90% for second time test takers. I was getting really worried at this point. The next school said their pass rate was 34% for first time test takers. I was completely floored, I asked the representative why their pass rate was so low, he said that many of their students just forgot their basic anatomy by the time their test came up. I thought, but that’s all we do is basic anatomy! I was feeling really depressed by this time but I continued looking around and saw schools representing physical therapy programs. I asked them what physical therapy even was and they said that they use exercise among other therapeutic techniques to improve patient function and decrease pain.

This was it, this is what I was looking for, this was the answer to what I was going to do for the rest of my life and how I would improve the lives of my family and my community. I asked the representative from that school the same question I had asked the chiropractic schools and they reported that their pass rate was 99.99%. I knew right then that that was the school I was going to go to. 

Three years later I graduated from Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions as a doctor of physical therapy. Ever since I have been helping people like you take the pebbles out of their shoes, changing their lives, helping them get rid of addictive medications, avoid costly and painful surgeries and improve their lifestyles. If you haven’t tried therapy yet for a pain relief option I cannot recommend it enough, it's helped so many people already and I am confident that it can improve your life as well! I’ll be posting a blog every Friday, in future blogs I’ll continue to share our story of To The Point and other topics about how we aim to change the healthcare system and change your life for the better. If you’re interested in learning more about a topic please feel free to leave a comment about what you would like for me to write about and I’ll add it to the list!

Wishing you well until next time!