We were lucky to catch up with Becky Gordy recently and have shared our conversation below.

Becky, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you share an important lesson you learned in a prior job that’s helped you in your career afterwards?

When most people think of physical therapy, they think of a large, open gym with a bunch of patients being supervised by a few PTs. Those PTs are running from patient to patient, sometimes passing patients off to techs, sometimes dividing their attention between 3 or more patients. I started out in a clinic just like this, with a lot of young professionals who were diliginelty trying to get our patients better. We were often working past our scheduled hours and through lunch, trying to give our patients the best care possible as well as researching new techniques, research, and interventions to be the best therapists we could be.
I had the opportunity to move from a large, national clinic to a small, female-PT-owned independent clinic. Within a few days of working there, I started to see the significant difference in patients’ outcomes when they were allotted one-on-one care and the ability to share their full story with their therapist. It didn’t matter so much that their sessions were 30 minutes rather than 60 or 75 minutes nor did it matter whether there was top-of-the-line, newly invented equipment. What mattered most was the patients feeling that they were heard, their PT saw them as a person rather than a number, and they had our undivided attention. It gave the patients incentive to buy in to what we were doing. Patients want to feel seen. They want to know you are empathetic and truly care about them more than anything else. Having the ability to give undivided attention to others in the current age of multi-tasking at all hours is rare and something that has a profound affect on healing.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have been a physical therapist for 7 years. I started out as an outpatient orthopedic therapist, focusing on sports medicine and working at the D2 collegiate level. I loved getting athletes back to what they loved to do, needing to find new challenges every day to meet the needs of their sport. I have slowly transitioned to working with a new kind of athlete – the expectant or new mother. Women need to not only juggle the needs of their changing bodies, but also care for their families with little to no time for rest or recovery. Most people are amazed by what professional athletes put their bodies through – crazy exercise routines, strict diets, etc, but take a look at a woman with three children who recently underwent major abdominal surgery (c-section), liftng, carrying, feeding her children on little to no sleep and tell me who has the more physically stressful job! As a new mother myself, I feel very passionate about empowering women to feel their best throughout their lives and breaking the mold that giving birth “ruins” your body. Having multiple patients come to me in tears stating they feel “broken” and leaving our time together feeling strong and capable is why I do what I do. As I continue to grow and learn in the field of pelvic floor and peri-partum physical therapy and the research continues to expand, I have hope that women will start to move away from an isolating postpartum experience to an empowering one.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Empathy and the ability to be an active listener are extremely helpful for succeeding in physical therapy. You need to not only hear what a patient is telling you, but also what they may not be telling you. How have their life experiences affected their body? Their ability to perform daily tasks? Have they been in chronic pain due to trauma? Have they been told they are broken and now believe they cannot be fixed? Are they a caregiver for a dying family member or disabled child and how does that affect them? The more a person feels seen and heard, the more likely they are to respond to treatment. Truly hearing their needs and sifting to find appropriate goals helps a patient believe they can succeed in therapy. They may not care about being able to do a fully squat, but they would give anything to get on the floor to play with their grandchild. Walking on a treadmill may seem boring or tedious, but getting back to a walk on the boardwalk, their favorite place in the whole world, may be the motivation they need to keep working at therapy!

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Going through a rigorous doctoral program, it was ingrained in me to follow the research – do everything by the book, follow explicit rehabilitation protocols to a T, don’t deviate from the expected. But patients are individuals. Sometimes you need to think outside of the box to help them reach their goals.

I was once treating a collegiate soccer player on her second ACL tear of her career. Once you have ACL-repair, any additional ACL surgeries on the same knee often become more complicated. Many people don’t know that you usually have more than one incision, the actual surgical site, some drains/scopes, but also an incision to retrieve the graft for the repair. This leads to multiple sites that need to heal, can be tender, sore or weakened – and more surgery means more potentially weakened or sore areas. This particular patient had a really difficult second recovery. We had been doing everything by the book, wokring with both myself and her athletic trainers to get her back for her senior season. At one point, she wasn’t sure she would ever get back on the field, let alone play at the level she was used to . Finally, we decided what we had been doing wasn’t working. We wracked our brains and came up with some new ideas to try, looking at this patient’s specific deficits and needs. We implemented them and within a few weeks, she was back to making major progress. She was able to return to play her season and eventually played for a semi-professional team. Looking back, if we hadn’t thought outside of the box, she may have never returned to play.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.practicallyperfectpt.com
• Instagram: @practicallyperfect.pt

Image Credits

Nicole Albertson Photography