Why Physical Therapy Is Important with David Park

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This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk Yeah, it sure has, man. It's great to connect with you. I know we connected through, I'm saying this a lot on podcast interviews lately, in the great Dan Martell's Elite Mastermind Group, which is some incredible coaching. We were just chatting about that before we got started here, but I love how, number one, how he's able to bring people together through the community, but also just being able to meet other incredible human beings like yourself, and of course, my platform is, Hey, let's get you on the podcast. And it's just a great way to, to get to know you. So great to have you here, man. I appreciate you carving some time out of your busy physical therapy day, uh, to hang out with me here, but I love to tell people's stories on this show. And for context purposes, let's help our listeners better understand a little bit more about you and your backstory. And let's do that by going back to the beginning of the story. Now, the beginning of the story is different for everyone. So choose wherever that may be. People are like, do I start after high school? Do I start after college? I always say you start wherever the Thank you, Sebastian. Physical therapy actually is a second career of mine. Before I went into the healthcare industry, I was actually in mortgage banking for about six, seven years during the subprime crash and everything like that. And living through that was kind of interesting. You know, definitely the up and downs you can imagine, right? And quite honestly, I want to say like early on in my career, I knew like, hey, I don't know if I want to do this. Right, I was miserable, but I didn't know this at the time. And I think it was reflected by, you know, going out, getting wasted, you know, definitely getting into a lot of extracurricular activities, you know, you can read between the lines, right. And quite honestly, back in 2000, I want to say eight, I believe, like one of the best things happened to me, my body crashed, like my physically, psychologically, I kind of had like this right down, right? I lost probably 40, 45 pounds within six weeks, right? And I was in the hospital for a little bit. I had to come back home. I was living in Chicago at the time, homes, New Jersey came home and had to take a leave of absence. And this was like this big, like meet Jesus moment. You know what I mean? What the hell do I want to do? Why is my body, my mind just breaking down, right? I've never experienced such a thing. And You know, the one thing I knew is like, I don't want to, I don't want to continue working in this industry. I want to get out of this kind of corporate grind or whatever. Right. And I just, honestly, at the time I'm on Google top 10 fulfilling professions, physical therapy was one of them. I don't know if it's still there. And, you know, I was like, all right, let me just continue working. I was, you know, I was working remotely.

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I went, I got back to work after I kind of. got over the acute phase of my health. I got back to working from home, but I started taking post-bac courses to be like, all right, let me just try this out.

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Right. And I've never taken a science course in undergrad. I was more of a finance than a psych major. And so I just started taking courses and over a couple of years of finishing up my post-bac, I was like, look, Let's see if I can get it, you know, like I applied to the schools and, you know, I got into the program, you know, I was living in New York City at the time. And that was it. I was like, all right, I'm done with the corporate world. I'm done with mortgage banking. Let's just pick this up. And I didn't really have too much experience with physical therapy, other than the observation and the volunteer hours that were required to get into the program. But I was like, what the hell? I knew I was miserable at my job. I knew I wanted to get the hell out. That was compelling enough for me to switch my career. And so fast forward, I'm now in the program. And the first year is a lot of didactic. You're in research. You're in, I'm sorry, you're in the classroom learning anatomy. You're in the anatomy lab and stuff like that. And it was great. It was nice to be back in the classroom again. And I was kind of like, oh, maybe I just missed learning. Maybe I just missed being in the classroom. Right. And then during my second year, I'd go on my clinical affiliation for the first time, which is a rotation where you get sent out to different areas as part of your curriculum. And I remember being in the hospital, helping a patient try to get from point A to B. That was my role, my duty to be able to assist the patient well from A to B. Now I was in a very acute care facility.

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What that means is the patient is not necessarily medical stable. Right?

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And so our job as physical therapists in that setting is to see if they are able to get discharged to a different facility. And one of the requirements is to assess how far can they walk and how much assistance do they need. And this was my first exposure to that type of setting. And I'm walking and helping him get to point A and B. And he has this bowel movement, just like, boom, you know what I mean? And just like all over. And I'm like, I don't know if I made this right career shift, you know? I was like, what did I do, you know?

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And I remember I came home and I talked to my girlfriend at the time. She's now my wife, you know? And I was like, Annette, I don't know if I made the right decision. I don't know if I want to do this, right?

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I had this Be Jesus moment. I wanted to help people, et cetera. I even called my buddy in Chicago. I was like, I need to get a desk. I think I'm going to leave. I want to go back to mortgages and stuff like that. And he was like, dude, just finish out the semester. It was a tough decision to get here. And I was like, all right, cool. After my rotation, I went to take a seminar, a weekend seminar that was required to graduate my program. to graduate the program, we needed to take a couple of continuing education seminars. And when I took this seminar, it was a seminar through the Institute of Physical Art. And that was the first time I ever heard of them. And listening to the material, talking about the case studies that they were addressing and seeing how they were managing patients, I was kind of blown away. I was like, wait, this is the type of PT that I want to do. I didn't even know it at the time, right? And I spoke with my, you know, professors and I was like I need to get into an affiliation or rotation spot through their institute. Like I don't care if I take a year off or whatever it is, I want to connect with patients at that level and I want to work with chronic pain patients outside of a hospital setting, right? And I didn't think I was going to private practice at the time. And so I did my affiliation, and it really broadened my horizon of what physical therapy can be, right? I was always accustomed to, oh, here's the TheraBand, here's a physio ball, I had to do some exercises, here's some electric spin, whatever it may be. But the paradigm or the introduction to the paradigm really kind of expanded the role of physical therapy, of how it may be such a great medium to getting patients back to optimal health and well being. Right.

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And so that's what really helped me commit to number practice, right, to this ever, ever, never ending journey of mastery, right, of diagnostics, interventions, and treatments, and also creating an environment where the right clinicians can come together to form like a think tank. you know, to optimize wellbeing and health for all of our patients that walk through our doors. So Yeah. That's a great, I mean, that's a great recap. I wish all of my guests actually gave context. Normally they run through that in about 35 seconds.

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And I was like, cool, thanks for recapping 15 years of your life in 30 seconds there. So the first thing that shows up for me is you researched the most fulfilling careers out there and the top of the list was physical therapy. Would you agree that that's because you're literally taking someone from point a to point B or taking them from in pain to relieved from it and able them to able to help them facilitate healing that.

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Do you think that's the reason why? I mean, because when you look at, you know, I think of like a chiropractor, If I go in and I'm like, my neck is jacked, I slept wrong. And, you know, they put the tens unit on maybe some heat, maybe some cold and they come in and, you know, boom, boom, boom, snap, snap, snap. And I walk out and you kind of, it's euphoric. Um, you know, you're, you're feeling incredible and they've got to feel great because they're making you feel incredible. It was that kind of your thought process when Um, honestly, the my thought process was I knew I wasn't fulfilled in mortgages. Yeah, I mean, the money was great. Right? The money was good at the time. I mean, before the crash and everything, right, but the money was great. So it wasn't the financial or the lack of financial reward, right? It was something else that just didn't resonate with me, right.

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But in hindsight, after being in practice and studying this for over 10 years, I'm becoming to understand what I believe I may have been called to do, right? And I always enjoyed service.

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right? I really enjoyed service. I remember listening to this years ago, that there's such a fine line or a fine difference between the pursuit of excellence and just ambition, right?

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Ambition is such a great characteristic. We hear it all the time. It's like, it's great to be ambitious, right? But there might be a slight connotation of being a little bit self-serving to a certain degree, right? Whereas excellence is really this pursuit of, what am I really called to do on this world? earth? What am I really good at? Right? And really trying to unravel some of those gifts. and then hone it, really get great at it, and then share that to the world. And that's kind of the thing that I really resonate with. And throughout my, even when I was an undergrad, despite doing finance or internships with business, during my school year, I would do internships working with the Juvenile Detention Center. That's where I felt really fulfilled, like serving, working with my church group. doing volunteer work. And so when I was looking for a profession, I think my gut knew that I wanted to do something in service. And physical therapy just kind of stood out to me because you have the autonomy, right?

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I'm not binded by a hospital setting. I have a lot of latitude in which how I can pursue my career. And Then it's like, all right, physical therapy is that great medium of where I can really fulfill that internal longing to serve others. And now being in practice and working with an awesome team, now that fulfillment comes from how do I serve my team to the best of my ability so everyone reaches their potential? And two, how do I serve my patients to the best of our ability so that they can reach their potential, right?

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So that's kind of, I'm learning, you know, what that means to be fulfilled as I continue on this journey. And I totally feel like I picked the right career I love that. You know, I wasn't in the mortgage business. I was for a short amount of time, but I was in the lead generation business for mortgage brokers. So when 2008 rolled around and I lived in Newport beach, California, that's a very expensive place to live when there's no revenue coming in. And I quickly realized poor planning and a gigantic ego led to very dark days of, well, there's no one to sell your product to because banks aren't lending. And if banks aren't lending brokers, aren't giving loans. And if they're not giving loans, they're definitely not buying leads.

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And I went through that. reinvention myself as well. I found myself selling everything I own and coming back to Miami with my daughter and a duffel bag and humble beginnings. And for two years, it was like, or maybe about a year and change. It was like, I didn't do anything. It was kind of a woe is me, but I think a lot of people were in 2008, like what in the fuck actually just happened right now? Cause you never would have been able to predict that. Right. Um, but, after some deep soul searching myself, found the same thing. It was like, God, what do you want from me? Because there's no way that I was born to just work, pay my bills and die. And I found my purpose in that storm. That's amazing.

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And I, and I, I've been living it for the past 15 years. It's a constant ongoing process. It took me like six years into that. It's probably 2016 that I felt really inclined to figure out where my place in the digital world, social media world was. And someone said, Hey, can you help me start a podcast one day? And I was like, boom, that's it. Sure.

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But that didn't come, these things don't show up for you without extreme introspection. and with, with, with doing some deep soul searching, I happen to do it through meeting a girl on a dating app and her introducing me through to a personal development course that would show me how to love myself. If you would've asked me, I had to figure out how to love myself so that I could love the work I was doing and, and, and share my gifts with the world. It's just kind of wild how, how, you know, again, life Right. And I think that's what I'm using this profession as right. Like oftentimes when you go to your chiropractor or physical therapist, right. A lot of times patients come to see us when they're in pain.

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Correct. Right. That's what really brings them into the door. Right. But believe it or not, physical therapists were experts in movement. And if you look at the top causes of death, at least in the United States, it's cardiovascular disease.

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And something that can really prevent that, or at least delay it as much as it can, is movement. So the way I'm now looking at the profession or this calling is, how do we best serve Right.

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And so, yes, I work with a lot of athletes. I work with general population. I work with a lot of patients with chronic pain that they've been struggling with for so many years, maybe even decades. And they stopped moving or enjoying activities that gave them a lot of fulfillment. And so now, oh, I know what that feels like. There's a fear avoidance behavior. There's this false perception of your own body. Let's unravel that together. You know, get you up to a certain level of function, give you the right education, because there's a lot of dog shit education out there. That's fear-mongering to the end power. You know what I mean? And let's get you moving and let the body do its thing and heal and get you, you know, along, right. And get back to the things that bring you joy and fulfillment. So that's really been the kind of the narrative shift in our practice. Right. And I believe my calling with So yeah, movement. I've, um, well, the older that we get, I'm 46, I feel 26, but also that's my main motivation to, to, to do something. I don't know necessarily say it's the gym. Yesterday I went to the gym after not going for like a week and I hit it pretty hard and I was just into it. Cause some days you are some days I just want to fucking walk.

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Dude, like, dude, well, why do we even have gyms, Sebastian? Like, why do we even have gyms?

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It's like, look, modern life is not so conducive to the way we were physiologically designed, right? Like, you know, sitting in front of a computer, I love it, engaging with you, right? But quite honestly, like, some of the great mentors and people that came way before me, they say, look, 80, 90% of musculoskeletal issues, like our pains and stuff, can be resolved with variety of movement.

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some of the stuff that being in front of the computer, just being in our own thoughts all the time, being indoors, not Yeah. Yeah. Well, you got to get a break that you have to break the pattern a little bit. I started playing tennis again a couple of months ago as well. And, uh, it was like, I returned to my roots. It was like, man, I loved this as a kid. Like I taught myself how to play. Like I used to be on a traveling league.

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I never played in high school or anything, but I loved it. And now I'm 46 playing the best tennis in my life. Um, and it's great. And I, It was funny yesterday, my studio is here in my den and I have a standup desk in my bedroom that's right in front of a window. And I was like, this will be cool. Cause if I want to come in here and write or just think or whatever, or just mix it up during the day, come in here with my laptop and stand up, I'll do it. I have never, I've been here since January. I've never done that. You know what? Let's just sit down for a minute. Let's open the blinds. and let's just think for a second. Then I looked at my desk organizer, I opened it up and there was a deck of cards in there. I said, do you still know how to play solitaire? I mean, I know we had not a play on our devices, but I'm talking like, let's actually count the cards out.

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Cause I love that. I mean, that's a lonely man's game, but they always say, right? And sure enough, I sat down there and played a game of solitaire and won the first hand. Let's go. There you go. I thought, you know, we're so, conditioned to do the same shit every single day, the same exact way. And it doesn't have to be like that. I mean, I'm very unconventional. All my friends are professionals and attorneys and I'm a comedian and podcaster, terrible career choices. But when it comes to income, you know, I can, it's a, it's almost a level playing field with a majority of my friends that went to school for years, which is wild. You know what I mean? Lately, I've been thinking around this whole idea of making more by doing less. And it's not about, if I put eight hours in today, I'm going, it's about somebody, I think it was, yeah, 2X is easier than 10X, I just got finished with. And the guy said, you know, I find three things that I need to do and get done every day. After those three things are done, I'm done. Sure. And I thought. Cause I'm, I mean, I don't start until 10, done by three most days. I try not to work Fridays. I'm never not working. I'm, you know, I have my phone, I'm there, but this whole notion around sitting around a desk for eight hours, just ain't happening. Just not doing it. And the more that I've done that, the more I've opened up, I mean, that freedom, that's my definition of success. Not necessarily monetarily. Freedom.

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And for us, like, um, for me, I think it might be a little, um, maybe a little different approach because although I do have a couple of practices, um, or just two practices here in the one, uh, New York, um, I still at heart, I'm a clinician, right. I'm still serve.

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I serve my patients. Right. And it's. I have a commitment to them and our team to continue learning.

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Sure. Right. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of talk of like, you know, what insurance sucks, insurance, this insurance, that. So you'll see a lot of PT, chiral clinics coming out like, oh, we're a cash based practice. And as a result, there are a lot of training. You know coaches that are now teaching how to be a cash-based practice because you can be independent, get the right reimbursement for your skill set and stuff like that. But one of the I guess pitfalls that I'm seeing right now in the current environment in my field is there's I want to say less of an emphasis on you know, pursuing that mastery and still clinical expertise.

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You know what I mean? And, and I like to kind of correlate that to, let's say a master sushi chef. You know what I mean? Like if you ever see, I don't know if you ever seen the Okay. If you ever get a chance, I highly recommend it. Um, but the journey is really interesting. It's about a restaurant in Japan. It was three Michelin stars and it documents the journey of one of the apprentices of how it takes 10 years to create a decent or a master sushi chef, right?

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Just to create the perfect egg. right?

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How to create that right rice proportion, right? And I think there are certain things like certain service fields, like whether it's physical therapy or chiro or healthcare that requires that time to gain a level of mastery. And I think it's ongoing. I don't think there's ever an end goal and we're never done. Nope.

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You're never done. You know what I mean? So this idea of, I guess, reducing the amount of time for maximum output.

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I think it works from a business operations standpoint. It's like, I can't always Don't I mean, how do I reduce that load so I can train other clinicians to have the same mindset to get up to par with the right team so we can serve more patients. I totally get it.

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But my job still has to get back into research, into books and learning. You know, the craft of physical therapy and movement. I love that.

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I think that's kind of, I just want to put an asterisk mark, at least for our fellow clinicians, right? Because one is like, yeah, I can just focus on the business, just do that, become a great salesperson, right? it's based on the assumption you have an excellent product too, right? So, I think that's something that, at least for us, we want to make sure that Physical therapy is so important. I fell, or may or may not have been tequila involved, a couple of years back, and it was in my living room, even worse, and I tripped on the area rug, and then like the end table was right there, and I caught my caught my fall and my hand was just bruised and I could not move. I had no range of motion. I couldn't shaking hands was painful and I got I thought I broke something. So I'm like a hand Institute getting x-rayed. No, you didn't break anything, but it's a bad bad bruise. Anyway. It was, it was having problems. Like I couldn't shake hands and like it wouldn't move. So I'm in Dallas had a mastermind meetup and I run into a new member there. Who's a local chiropractor in Dallas. And I was like, Hey doc, while I got your ear real quick, like, here's what I got going on. He's like, dude, you need to check out shockwave therapy. And I'm like, what is it?

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He's like, It basically shocks you and stimulates stem cells and breaks up all the scar tissue in there and will help get mobility. It's not cheap, but it's effective. And just through that conversation, so I called my chiropractor who works at a PT clinic here in Coconut Grove. And, uh, sure enough, they had it. I mean, a hundred bucks a session, not the cheapest stuff and kind of painful, but yeah, I got, I mean, I'd say about 95% motion back, but huge believer in chiropractic care, physical therapy as well. The body heals itself and, you know, being able to, uh, you know, experience work like you guys do helps that process, but we don't know what we don't know. Yeah, You know, it's about shockwave therapy is, has really been popular over the past several years. You see it all over TikTok and Instagram and especially in your an insult. There was an injury that you knew you knew what happened, right? But for some of our athletes who, you know, struggle with chronic injuries, all that recurring rotator cuff, that recurring Achilles tendonitis, right? Which people are very scared of, et cetera, et cetera. Yes.

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The shockwave therapy will help address that kind of pathological structure, but the art comes into understanding why is it recurring? Right. Why is it continuing to show up when you're playing this game at this intensity? Right.

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And I think that's where, you know, learning that ability to differentially diagnose kind of sets us apart because there are a lot of toys. Shockwave is the new thing. It used to be laser therapy. There's ultrasound, you name it. And Shockwave, I'm a proponent for. I'm not trying to You know what I mean? But let's, let's still try to dig deeper with all Well, David, I really enjoyed our conversation, man. It's been great to finally connect with you here. I'm sure this is one of many conversations that we'll have. I'll definitely hit you up next time I'm in the city. Please do, man. Could always use a good, could always, is anything wrong? You're always welcome, man. Just come on in. All right. Good. I appreciate that. Any, Um, on PT, on the body, on healing, move, just move, find, find an activity that you enjoy. And if there's anything that you want to get back to contact a local practitioner, who's going to help you get back to some of the activities that you may have kind of tabled because of whatever the reason is, but I would just please move, move, move, right. Get some sunlight Great advice as well. Hey, thanks again for your time, David. If you're in the New York, New Jersey, greater New York, New Jersey area, and you're in need of good physical therapy, you're thinking, I didn't even think about this, but I need this. All of David's contact information is going to be in the show notes. That's the description of this podcast episode. David, keep doing work that matters. I really enjoyed our conversation.

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I appreciate your time. Thank you so much, man. Have a good one. God bless.

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You do the same thing. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios.