Cedar Hill Physical Therapy

As a physical therapist, I help people get moving. My best tools are exercise instruction, biofeedback, manual therapy, and patient education. In my approach, I focus on empowering a patient to help themselves. The benefits to this are a faster recovery with less treatment needed. This requires patients to take an active role in their rehabilitation.

Everyone that I have the opportunity to work with is unique. I constantly find myself trying new techniques in order to bring about the desired results. In this blog I’m going to talk about those techniques which I use to improve follow through with the exercise prescription which is tailored to help the individual to reach his or her goals.

Reflecting on my life, I owe a lot to my mom. She instilled in me values that over the years I have come to greatly appreciate.

Among these was a talk I think of as the “Plant the Seed” talk. When I was in elementary school, I was a good student, albeit not the most motivated of kids. We talked about a fellow student, a bright young man who excelled in his studies. Mom told me that if I applied myself, I could do just as well. She described my potential as a gift, a seed that needed to be planted and nurtured in order that it would grow.

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with a teenager who is an avid horseback rider. She was great to work with. It was evident that she took an active role in her rehabilitation. When I gave her something to work on, she would return for follow up demonstrating her proficiency and improved performance in what she had been shown. She simply is the type of person that a physical therapist loves to work with.

During her course of therapy she corrected the deficits she had demonstrated at her initial evaluation. With that, I encouraged her to resume activity as tolerated. Towards the end of her treatment she reported resuming horseback riding. So much so that the activity was limited more by the horse’s fatigue than her own! With that, I recommended to her physician a full return to horseback riding as tolerated, including participation in an upcoming horse show.

Looking back, it has been four months now since I left my previous job to open Cedar Hill Physical Therapy. During that time a lot has happened. We remodeled parts of the house. We acquired the equipment needed to provide treatment. We filled out multiple insurance forms so that we could become participating providers with insurance companies. We worked closely with Gigi Burkhalter who we feel did a fantastic job with our logo, and Dave Reed who made our website really pop.

I had anticipated that process taking a few weeks. It was more like a couple of months. It was in early November that we started seeing a few patients. Most of them were friends. Two physical therapists who are friends of mine, Aaron LeBauer and Gray Carpenter, were the first people to refer patients to Cedar Hill Physical Therapy.