Wes
I get to know patients and have a significant part in their return to function and escape from pain. I really feel like their victories are my victories.
“I’ve been here 23 years,” says Wes, a physical therapist at The University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, Tn, “and we have the ability—we’ve maintained the ability—to spend one-on-one time with our patients.” Wes, who describes himself as “a hands-on kind of person,” has built a successful career in a hands-on physical therapy program serving East Tennessee that logged 20,000 patient visits to the medical center in 2006. Working in the center’s adult outpatient location and focusing on the treatment of back pain and injuries, Wes makes his practice a therapeutic partnership with those he treats.
“I appreciate the quality time we spend with patients,” he says. “It’s rewarding, and I think it offers better care as well.”
Wes has a history of tackling problems head on. In his junior year in a forestry program at the University of Montana, he dropped out of school to become a lumberjack. “All the other kids I was in class with grew up in the woods, and I was a kid from the suburbs,” he says. “They had all run chainsaws, and I’d never seen one.”
Intending to get the practical experience he felt he lacked and then return to his studies, he became a timber faller but soon tired of the outdoor life. “I found myself looking at warm hospitals as I drove to work in the dead of winter and thinking, ‘There has got to be jobs in there,” he explains.
A friend’s wife in a pre-physical therapy program at the University of Montana encouraged Wes to give the field a try. He went back to school, entered the program and took to it immediately—“it was like swimming downstream,” he says. After graduation, he entered a joint U.S. Army-Baylor University physical therapy program in Texas and received a full course of training. He came to The University of Tennessee Medical Center in 1983 after five years of service as a physical therapist in the military.
“I used to think I wanted to be a doctor,” Wes says, “but halfway through PT school I said, ‘I really like this.’ I liked being able to walk through things with patients and watch them get better.” Wes became adept at helping people, particularly those with back problems, make the changes needed to improve their lives.
Physical therapy is a special kind of healing. In the case of low back pain, physical therapists can apply particular “passive” remedies such as cold packs, electric stimulation or ultrasound to provide relief. For lasting solutions, though, they also work with patients to develop active exercise programs that stretch back muscles, ligaments and tendons and increase mobility and flexibility. Other exercises can strengthen core muscles in the abdomen, back and gluteus to reduce stress on the lower back. The idea is to devise a program that will not only relieve the problem but also prevent it from recurring.
The University of Tennessee Medical Center provides inpatient physical therapy to patients recovering from surgery or strokes as well as therapy on an outpatient basis. Two outpatient clinics are located on the medical center campus, and four satellite clinics are spread throughout the region. Outpatients average four to six visits per treatment.
The medical center’s role as a teaching institution gives its therapists special expertise, says Ann Giffin, vice president of the Brain and Spine Institute, which oversees physical therapy. The medical center takes in students for practical training from some 25 physical therapy programs across the region—with the result, says Giffin, that “every one of our therapists is also a teacher. They have to stay sharp, they have to stay up-to-date and they have to know what the literature says about treatment of a particular injury or disability.”
Wes says he enjoys the challenges and the sense of accomplishment that comes with meeting them. “You get to know patients and have a significant part in their return to function and escape from pain,” he says. “You really feel like their victories are your victories.”
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Physical Therapist