kind of

out of lane for a lot of us, right? But in a 1928 book, he wrote, learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.

And I think that's broadly applicable, right? Whether we're doing mental health therapy, whether we're doing physical therapy, massage therapy, exercise therapy, right? We can know a lot and we all know a lot.

We've learned a lot.

We spend a lot of freaking money learning a lot, not just in school.

But continuing that and the multiple layers of that.

But I think we can lose sight of that.

So what else did you want to pick up on?

Do you wanna tell us, like, what are your roots in? Like, how did you get to become a physical therapist all the way up to what you do now?

Oh, God, you don't wanna be bored with that entire story, but, you know, I eventually made it through the University of Buffalo after seven years of, of, like, fumbling around there.

And back then, you know, back when I graduated, it was a bachelor's only profession.

There wasn't even a master's in PT at the time in the mid-'80s, and then later on they added the master's, and now it's a doctoral profession.

And, um, you know, back in the day, '85 was not particularly strong in evidence-based practice at all.

In fact, it really hadn't been incorporated till a bunch of years later.

So there was a lot of, um, you know, a lot of historical narrative type of things that we learn from, modalities like electric modality, all sorts of things.

Yeah.

[laughs]

... and now I, um, I, I sort of, uh, well, over the last six years, kind of veered off on a slightly different path.

I, prior to two, or COVID, the beginning of COVID, I was teaching m- pretty much, um, half and half classes to massage and physical therapists, as well as classes to speech pathologists.

But during, uh, that early COVID period, I had a really ch- good chance to sort of regroup and take a look at myself and, um, and I decided to make a shift.

And now the only classes I teach live are my voice and swallowing disorders classes.

I do get, I do, I get a, a wide range of therapists attending those.

It's not just speech therapists, speech pathologists.

Mm

Yeah.

Um, and, um, I, you know, f- for the last, oh, 30 years I've been educat- an educator at varying levels, first working for the, um, John Barnes, the person who taught me this work, and then, uh, branching off on my own.

I, uh, started, you know, sort of with a myofascial release, um, light version, um, when I started teaching this work.

One might say, um, you know, there were, there were a lot of parallels with how I learned this work and how others learned this work, but maybe without some of the things that really bothered me about that work.

But over time, over education, over experience, as well as some pressure from, [chuckles] from a lot of my online colleagues who were trying to kick my butt to sort of leave that myofascial release narrative behind, I finally did.

Um, and we just sort of, you know, generalized the name of my work to manual therapy instead of myofascial release, which, um, you know, manual therapy includes massage, includes myofascial release, trigger point, blah, blah, blah, everything else.

Um, wasn't until 2013 I, um, totally because I have a big mouth on the internet, and I was talking about some, some sort of comorbidities I was seeing with my patients.

Yeah