We are here to shatter your expectations! In 2009 I swung open the doors of Inner Bridges Physical Therapy & Wellness to bring to you the best Physical and Manual Therapy have to offer. My journey began as a student of Physical Therapy at Notre Dame College in my home state of New Hampshire. As a student, I quickly came to see the limitations of traditional physical therapy approaches like exercise, topical modalities and soft tissue mobilization like massage. During my clinical internships I found that the patients with small problems got better, the patients with medium problems got some better but not all better and the patients with big problems either didn’t get better, got worse, or got a little better for a short time. It wasn’t good enough; not by a long shot.
I took this up with my Dean who fortunately opened my eyes to a whole world of possibilities in the specialty area of manual therapy. She sent me to Germany for my next internship to study Orthopedic Manual Therapy with some of the best clinicians worldwide. Orthopedic Manual Therapy is a highly specific yet simple model of hands-on muscle and joint techniques that originated in Europe. With this addition to my bag of tools I was re-inspired about Physical Therapy and about my ability to help patients. I practiced and practiced and developed good skills with Orthopedic Manual Therapy quickly. In fact, I was already attaining far better results as a student than therapists 20 years my senior.
I took all this new found passion and enrolled in an Orthopedic Manual Therapy certification program to begin the fall after I graduated from my master’s program in Physical Therapy. For the summer in between, like every other new graduate, I needed to find a job. Through a fellow student I found a woman in private practice looking to hire a ‘manual therapist’ and since I fancied myself a manual therapist I decided to apply for the job. It turned out that this woman didn’t do Orthopedic Manual Therapy at all; she was being trained in Integrative Manual Therapy. Integrative Manual Therapy, or IMT for short, was very different from the manual therapy I had been training in. I remember observing a treatment session at my interview and almost falling asleep standing against the wall watching. I was young and arrogant and I remember thinking, “what is this boring crap?”. I can’t tell you my surprise when the patient that hobbled in and needed help getting up on the table, bounced up after her hour session and strode out with a smile and a thanks. My chin hit the floor from shock and, humbled I instantly needed to know what just happened and took the job to find out.
Then an interesting turn of events happened during my very first week that I feel changed my trajectory forever and began me on the path I am still walking today. My mom got Facial Palsy. It was the second time and this time it was the other side of the face; the side my mom called her ‘good’ side. Facial Palsy is a paralysis that can be temporary but my mom still had some residual problems from her first bout with this condition and was very scared the same thing would now happen on the good side of her face.
I told my new boss about this and it turned out that not only was she a certified expert in Facial Palsy rehabilitation, but she also was registered for a seminar that next weekend that was a training in Facial Palsy rehabilitation using an IMT approach. She was actually planning to cancel the seminar because she could no longer make it but instead, generously offered to send me in her place. Wow! I thought it was totally meant to be. Not only to hopefully help my mom save her ‘good’ face but also I could get a look into what IMT was all about. I went to the course and to this day I remember the feeling the instant I figured out what IMT was. The teacher was talking about the facial artery, a circulatory vessel that brings blood flow to the face, and was teaching the group a technique for eliminating muscle spasm in the wall of the vessel to help increase blood flow to aid in recovery of Facial Palsy. Wow! Something about the combination of hands-on work, the direct interface with pathology and the application of detailed anatomy(which was and is a great passion of mine) just landed for me and I was instantly in love. The very next weekend I tracked down the woman who developed IMT, Dr. Sharon Weiselfish, who was teaching a seminar in Maine and I eagerly sat in the front row to hear from the horse’s mouth what this was all about. What I learned was that Sharon had studied basically all there was to study in the world of manual therapy and had taken all she’d learned, combined with her unique brilliance and developed this enormous body of work that she called Integrative Manual Therapy. I remember saying to another student at the course that weekend, “If this crap really works, I’m in”.
Boy did it work! After some practice, not only did my mom get her face back but all my other patients were getting better too. That summer everything changed. I cancelled the Orthopedic Manual Therapy training I was planning and threw myself into learning IMT. Within two years I had completed over 50 seminars, by year three I was certified in IMT and had begun teaching other students, and by year four I was hand selected by Dr. Weiselfish to enter into an apprenticeship program with her. For the next two and half years I studied, worked and traveled the world with Sharon mastering the art and science of Integrative Manual Therapy.
I worked with Sharon for many years at her numerous clinics throughout the US. I learned and taught and grew my skills. I managed clinics for Sharon, helped start a non-profit professional association for IMT practitioners, started a professional journal and taught students about research methods to promote submissions to the journal. Patients in the clinics were exceeding every outcome anyone would have imagined; it felt great and I was having a blast.
As the years ticked on I ultimately began to feel limited by IMT. I had learned so much and gained great skill but I started feeling like a painter that was asked to paint a sunset using only 3 colors. I decided to go out on my own and I began deconstructing IMT to simplify the hands-on work. I also started incorporating back in my prior learning in physical therapy and Orthopedic Manual Therapy. Armed with all I had learned from Sharon about pathology and why the body does what it does I started working more closely with other disciplines to bring elements into patient care that were missing or inefficient with IMT. I ultimately named what I was creating Manual Therapy Essentials and starting teaching other physical therapists this method in hopes they could learn it more easily than it was to learn IMT.
Working this way supercharged the speed with which patients got better and allowed me to help more patients than I could have with just IMT alone. When I opened Inner Bridges in Cambridge I assembled a team of practitioners and together our goal is to help as many patients as possible achieve their goals. We have developed a specialty in helping children and families overcome difficult challenges as well as working with the population of people living in pain to live a pain free life.
Thank you so much for your interest in Inner Bridges and I hope the information here on our site gives you a good sense of who we are, what we are all about and if we are the right choice to help you or your loved one with your specific needs. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions.
Sincerely,
Ellen
Ellen H. Helinski MS, PT, IMT.C.