Susan Mclaughlin

My intrigue with the human body evolved after an injury sustained in a car accident. I experienced constant back and nerve pain down my right leg and into my foot. I tried conservative approaches: chiropractic, physical therapy, and a nerve root injection to no effect. My solution was surgery. And for a few years I was “fixed”; I was 25 at the time. Gradually, back pain returned as well as periodic SI dysfunction, and pain became the focus of my life for 10 years. My pain ranged from a moderate continuous inconvenience to short episodes of incapacitation: unable to walk or stand up straight. In 2011 my perspective changed. I began to be more objective about how I moved and used my body on a daily basis. I realized that I had a lot of tension in my nervous system and muscles, and I had been standing with my pelvis forward and tucked, with my shoulders back and behind me. This posture is a position of great imbalance for the SI joints, hips and pelvis, and also compresses the lumbar spine. No wonder I was in pain! Within 3 months of being attentive to how I stood, and performing other movement correctives, I was not in pain anymore. At the time of my accident in 1994 I was fumbling with what I wanted to “do” in life. I was a college graduate with a degree in english, working for UPS slinging boxes to make my living. I had relied on my body, and because of the pain, I couldn’t use it in the job I had chosen. This experience placed me into self-reflection: I discovered that I wanted a profession that was focused on health, wellness and taking care of the body. I wanted to support other people to learn about their own bodies, to get out of pain and become vital. And so I began the process of getting an education to become a physical therapist.