Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Rick Mathes. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Rick, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the story behind how you got your first job in field that you currently practice in.

In a nutshell, My journey started in December of 1992 when I was involved in a catastrophic car accident. An elderly gentleman got confused and pulled off the median of Interstate 10 right into the high-speed lane, where I T-boned him at 70 miles an hour. He died being airlifted to the hospital, and I fractured every vertebra in my lumbar spine and was in physical therapy five to six days a week for almost two years.

I was in constant, unrelenting pain that significantly limited the quality of my life. I couldn’t be the person, husband or father I wanted to be. For six years, I tried every therapy I could find, trying to get my body back, to get my life back. Nothing worked until I found the Egoscue Method.

I bought Pete Egoscue’s second book, Pain Free, and immediately knew this was how I was going to get my body back. At this point, we lived a three-hour one-way drive from one of only two Egoscue clinics in the country. I began making that drive every other week and doing my homework every day. Within a few months, not only was I feeling better, I was playing singles tennis at a 4.5 level with no back pain.

I found the experience so transformative that after Pete Egoscue opened the Egoscue Institute to allow others to learn how to practice this method, I enrolled and became only the 23rd person in the world to get certified through the Institute. I began a practice nights and weekends out of a chiropractor’s office in Thousand Oaks, California, until Pete Egoscue offered us the opportunity to open his first franchise clinic, which we did in Austin, Texas in 2003.

We stayed in that franchise system until 2022 when we left for business reasons to become an independent clinic doing the same type of therapy. Now, 75% of all our therapy is by Zoom, and we help people both here in Central Texas and around the world get out of pain, take ownership over their health, and get their lives back.

Rick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

On the prior page, I explained how I got into what I do. Here I’ll explain what it is.

Pete Egoscue is considered the father of postural therapy. We don’t believe most people have musculoskeletal pain because of the condition of their body, but the position of their body. A joint can’t feel or function the way it was designed if it’s out of position. And when a joint is out of position, the body has to compensate around it. The stronger and more ingrained those compensations become, the more posturally distorted the body becomes, and symptoms follow.

We assess clients posturally and functionally, looking for both postural distortions and what we call dysfunction—what the body is not doing that it is designed to be able to do. We then give the client a routine of simple, corrective exercises that typically takes 15 to 20 minutes each day to complete. This will bring their back into postural balance, restore lost function, and help the body organically eliminate symptoms.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I opened our clinic with my now ex-wife. We were married for over 30 years and still run our clinic together. Back in 2005, two years after we opened, we got the bad news from a neurosurgeon that she had a brain tumor that was growing and we needed to operate within a few days. That doctor’s appointment was at lunchtime. We both had a full schedule of clients that afternoon. After we cried, we held each other and prayed. Then we drove back to our clinic. We agreed that when we got home, we could let ourselves feel the fullness of those emotions. But for now, we had clients driving in from out of town who were counting on us to help make their pain better, to make their lives better. We committed that for the next few hours, that was the most important thing in our world. We did great therapy that afternoon, and I’m really proud of it.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

Without question, emotional intelligence and people skills—the ability to really listen to people, to see them, to connect with them, and strive to understand them and communicate with them in a way where they can effectively assimilate what we’re trying to teach them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://alignpainsolutions.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alignpainsolutions/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlignPainSolutions/

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