Episode 34: Interview with Delaine Fowler
Are you living your best possible life? What does it actually mean to live a "Well Lifetime"? Tune in to today's episode as Delaine Fowler delves deeper into this concept!!
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Show Notes:
Introduction
Guest: Delaine, an expert in physical rehabilitation.
Discussion on the importance of movement and physical therapy.
Personal Experience
An anecdote about an older woman who opted out of physical therapy, leading to long-term reliance on a sling.
Movement as Medicine
Importance of active rehabilitation post-surgery.
Delaine’s experience as a runner and triathlete, understanding the importance of continuing to move despite minor injuries.
Emphasis on not restricting athletes or patients from their favorite activities if possible.
Risks of long-term inactivity, especially for back issues.
Approach to Physical Therapy
Comparisons made between professional athletes and those in physically demanding jobs.
Reference to tools and treatments available for professional athletes.
Delaine’s belief in offering similar care to "industrial athletes."
Emotional Component in Rehabilitation
Recognizing that physical pain or limitation can sometimes be linked to emotional trauma or stress.
Anecdote about a patient with a frozen shoulder who had an emotional release during therapy.
The significance of focused stretching and movement.
Importance of truly connecting with and humanizing patients.
Workplace Integration
Teaching employees proper lifting techniques to prevent injury.
Personal success story of a worker who benefited from correct lifting techniques.
Company Growth and Goals
Delaine’s company's growth from caring for 15 people a day to 10,000 a day.
Aim to eventually care for 50,000 people a day.
Company's mission to proactively prevent injuries and promote wellness.
Clientele
Mention of notable brands Delaine has worked with including Freightliner, Jockey, Dillard's, Gilbarco, and Aldi.
Discussion about the importance of recognizing workers in essential industries, especially during challenging times like the pandemic.
Contact and Closing
Mention of Delaine's website and LinkedIn profile.
Closing remarks and episode end.
Key Takeaways:
Movement as Medicine: Emphasizing the importance of movement and active rehabilitation in healing processes.
Holistic Approach to Care: Recognizing that emotional, mental, and physical well-being are interconnected. Addressing one can have effects on the others.
Workplace Safety: Proper training, especially in manual tasks like lifting, is essential to prevent injuries in the workplace.
Human Connection: Beyond medical treatment, genuinely connecting with and understanding patients/employees can significantly impact their healing and well-being.
Acknowledgment of Essential Workers: Recognizing and appreciating those in roles that keep society functioning, especially during crises, is crucial.
Transcript:
Welcome back to Better Than A Pill. Today I'm so excited to have Delaine Fowler on with me as
a guest and Delaine is a physical therapist and the owner of Accelerate Therapy and
Performance, which is located in Salisbury, North Carolina. She is also married and mother of
three boys, ages four, nine, and 11, as well as a triathlete.
So welcome Delaine.
Hey, thanks for having me, Cari. I'm so pumped to be here.
Yay. Me too. I'm so glad to have you here. And I know today we're going to be talking a little bit
about what it means to live a good lifetime. And, and I want you to kind of start off a little bit by
telling us a little bit about your story and how you got involved in the work that you do.
Well I became a Physical Therapist because I was a collegiate athlete that got hurt. So a lot of
times that's the story with PTs, right? We got hurt. We had a PT or someone along our path that
inspired us and that's certainly what happened to me. My best friend's mom was a PT. My
shoulder issue had taken me out of swimming collegiately. And even two years later, my
shoulder would flare up every time I do an overhead press or any time I'd swim 500 yards, that
shoulder would flare up. And my best friend said, come on, uh, come over to my mom's house.
She should look at your shoulder. And I was like, I don't know.
Are you sure? She did two things to my neck and gave me a couple exercises. And within six
weeks, I was swimming as far as I wanted. My shoulder pain was gone. And I was like, Oh, this
is what I want to do. With my career. So from then, I really dove into what makes people well
and happy and healthy. And certainly part of that is our bodies.
And part of that is our brains. But we've decided to detach the two instead of knowing that they
all function together. And so well, lifetime really has to do with how we are living our fullest lives,
emotionally, physically, and mentally too, and being, being good to all parts of us. Wow. Yeah.
That totally makes sense to me.
Yeah. A lot of times we're thinking that they are separate and the mind and body are not. In fact,
the more, the more we can connect them, the better, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the more
we move, the better we feel. And that's usually true for almost everybody, uh, but we don't like to
admit it, right? Our lazy brains, our lizard brains like to say, no, this is like, Let's not be active.
And so to fight that by just saying, I'm going to go and do it, even if it's just, I'm going to get out
of bed. You know, if you can only take that one little step right then, and I'm going to brush my
teeth, I'm gonna put my clothes on. Right. So just making the choice to take that one more step,
even if it seems simple is really important.
Yeah. I love the last podcast I listened to from better than the pill was about just living today, you
know, just living today for today. And then tomorrow and the next day versus projecting all those
things that could be negative and wrong that might happen, but don't really exist yet so that was
really great.
Yeah. Thank you. No, a hundred percent because yeah, we can get stuck in the past and not be
fully present. Right. And, you know, so, so it's interesting. So tell me a little bit more about the
nature of your work, I guess, above and beyond the actual physical therapy piece here. Yeah,
sure. Uh, so I, I love our physical therapy practices and we help people in their everyday life
where you think about traditional PT, somebody's hurt.
They come into our office and we fix them. But outside of that, Accelerate is a national
consulting firm with corporations and we help companies reduce injury rates. And that's like the
nutshell nugget of it, but in reality we're frontline healthcare providers for their employees.
Because we know that employees who do really hard work They're just like athletes.
So we call them industrial athletes, and we try to shift their mindset into how they have to treat
themselves. Well, they have to recover. They have to hydrate. They have to do their job. Well,
because they're going to take their bodies with them wherever they go. So our clients that we
work with really, really care about their employees.
And so they put us in the house. To, walk around on the floors, on the warehouse floors, the
manufacturing floors, just to say, Hey, how's it going? Do you have any aches, pains and
problems? What, what's going on here? And to try to not just dive into like your wrist hurts a little
bit, but why is your wrist hurting a little bit?
And then adjusting the work from there. So, it's just a, it's a super rewarding, rewarding career
because we can take care of the employees. This is just what my. My, my team does really well.
They're athletic trainers and physical therapists. So they're, they're born to serve and they're so
excited to know, like, they're going to the source of the issue and stopping something before it
starts.
And that's what's super powerful. So then we watched the company's injury rates come down,
their lost days to work come down. We watched their, uh, employee retention increase because
that employee knows they're working for an employer who cares about them. Like fully and
wholly, not just the work that they do, not just that they're getting, you know, productivity
standards, but that they can do it well and do it like an athlete does.
Wow. And I love that term, industrial athlete. That's great. Yeah. And, and this is, so this is really
interesting. So it sounds to me like this is a hands on approach where you actually are sending
physical therapists and it sounds like athletic trainers, right into. Into companies. And so they're
actually, they're there, they're walking around.
And then to like, for example, they're talking to the employees, like, how does that work and
then actually helping them because they're going to be working, right? They're doing a job like,
do you, do they have to meet and do like physical therapy or kind of explain to me how this
works a little bit?
Sure. No problem. And I'll go back to the example that really made me reframe in this direction
with my PT career, instead of sitting in our office and fixing people in there. Early in my career, I
watched, I did a lot of work comp injuries, and I would see the same people from the same
companies coming in over and over and over again.
And I just got tired of it one day, and I was like, you know what, I've got to figure out what's up
with this. So I called, I started calling companies. And some of them invited me and I would tour
around and watch how people work. One day I was watching this lady work and she asked me
what I was doing there.
And I explained, she's like, Oh, she's like, well, I moved from that line to this line a couple of
months ago. And ever since my wrist has really been killing me. I'm like, okay, well, let me watch
you work. And if I can help you out, I will. She's okay. So I watched her work and I watched her
push a button in a really weird way over and over and over again, you know, repetitively.
And I was like, okay, so I called the maintenance guy over and I said, Hey, can we move that
button from there to somewhere around here? And he said, yeah, maybe, maybe I think so. So I
went away for a few weeks and I came back to do something else. And that lady almost tackled
me because she was so happy.
Her wrist pain was gone, but not only that, but all the other people who worked on that line
thanked her because she took the time to find a solution. And I was pumped because I knew I
could be a part of the, not just the fix of the symptoms, but the fix of the cost. And so that's what
my employees do every day.
My athletic trainers and PTs literally walk around saying, okay, well, why, why does your wrist
hurt? Let's manage that. Let's figure out why that hurts and take care of you. So we have the
care side. Of that. We don't do physical therapy. We don't do athletic training per se. We do first
aid, in that instance.
So we're, you know, we're doing protocol programs and things that we design in house for our
clients, uh, ice, heat, taping, non rigid bracing, that kind of stuff for our care side. Our coaching
side. We are literally on the floor saying, okay, like, instead of grabbing that potato bag
overhanded and pulling it towards you, grab it underhanded and pull it towards you.
And then that way they're ergonomically positioned better. And hopefully through that education
and that coaching, that that person can take that for a lifetime. So not just my elbow pain gone
now, but oh, this is how I'm supposed to grab a bag of potatoes, onions, concrete, you name it.
And then they'll know what to do that's proper for them, because they're going to take their body
forever.
So we want to make sure that they... Keep that sucker running. Yeah. So it is really like dealing
with an athlete, just a different type of athlete. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. We're definitely
coaching them so we get, we get, you know, a physical therapist and especially absolute athletic
trainers. We love the care side, but when we get to be the coach and the strength and
conditioning coach to fix that thing, that's like.
That's like the jelly on our peanut butter sandwich, you know, we love it. And, and so you're
obviously seeing results. I mean, you're, you're making a difference. Yeah you know, we've
been, I've been doing this for 20 years and, uh, it seems like our client list grows and grows and
grows because companies are fed up with how our sick care system runs.
And tired of the rigmarole that work comp insurance companies have been putting them through
and arbitrarily increasing their rates and all that. So they're, they're taking it into their own hands
and saying, we're going to care for our employees. And then we're going to bring that to our
insurance companies and healthcare providers and say, Hey, look, this is what we're doing.
Help us, help us be well, help us, help our employees be well versus take care of us when we're
sick. So, uh, such a great preventative strategy, Delayne. It's brilliant. I love it. And it's like
you're, you're catching, injuries on this before they occur. I mean, there may be something, you
know, somebody, like you said, you're doing first aid feeling something like this, but you are,
you're stopping things, before they actually have to.
To go to physical therapy, right? Right. Yeah. Somebody, I think somebody asked me once,
they're like, why would you do that? It's reducing your business. So I was like, no, it's not that
people get hurt all the time. Like people getting injured is a big blue ocean. It's just, it's letting
people know that physical therapists are there to care for them.
So a lot of times they'll go to a provider that's. not equipped, in their education to know what to
do, a physician is brilliant when you have a, a sick child with an ear infection. I am so grateful for
an antibiotic, but pain pills don't really get you out of pain and they certainly don't fix your
problem, right?
And so with physical therapy, the goal is to get to the cause and stop the cause. You get out of
pain first. And then you train to not have that again. And so, you know, I'm, I'm a big proponent
of PT first and PT early for musculoskeletal issues, you know, see your doctor, make sure it's
not something, you know, bad or anything like that, but go to the PT pretty quick after that.
And so the physical therapist that you're sending in and you've, and you've done work yourself,
obviously it's different type of training, I would guess is because they're not assessing
somebody in the same way that they're used to, right? Yes. Yes. It's definitely, it's definitely a
shift for our athletic trainers.
They're used to being a little more reactionary and our PTs do, being a little more reactionary of,
oh gosh, you know, that player's hurt. What should I do? Right now versus this is just an egg,
but I always say with our industrial athletes, none of them are running off the doctor when it's
just an eight, but they're mad as heck when they have to have surgery because they waited too
long.
And and and so, and they're mad at the company, and then they get thrown through the work
comp rigamarole. So they're even more mad, even though it's not the company's fault and so to
stop all that angst. All the paperwork for the employer, all, you know, we, we basically mitigate
all that. So, so our, you know, our program is, uh, something of a joy.
I, jokingly , say we're like unicorns and rainbows for everyone and once, once our athletic
trainers realize, like, kind of take on that role of, I, I'm the consultant, I'm, this is my team. I'm
going to take care of the team, even when it's little, like that's, that's, that's where it kind of
comes in.
That power comes into what they're saying. Awesome. So it's like you have this team going in,
let's say you have a company and, and you send in like a certain number of physical therapists
or, and, or athletic trainers. And so they're just kind of assessing, walking around. It sounds like
a lot of it is a manufacturing type setting that you go into a lot.
Yeah. Warehousing, warehousing, a lot of warehousing, a lot of manufacturing. Yeah. Okay. And
because that's more of a physical type of workplace, right? Okay. And then I, you know, we're
doing a lot of, work at home desk setups for our corporate clients and we can do that on, on the,
in the, their office buildings as well.
But we've certainly started with the whole work from home movement. Uh, we've adapted to
home working spaces and having fun with our corporate clients in that way too. But most of its
manufacturing and warehouse work. We like being in person and in house with people.
Awesome. Very cool. And then, and then basically when you see the red flags or maybe it's like
the way, basically the way people are moving incorrectly while, while they're in these lines, that's
where the physical therapist and trainers, it sounds like they're intervening and, and, then the
physical therapy piece really is not necessary.
Just want to confirm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, and, and it's still, it's still the, it's the
same mode. You're just thinking about how I'm preventing this from happening versus how do I
rehab that to get it better. No, that totally makes sense to me. And yeah, because I mean,
there's so many, and first of all, a lot of things that, you know, I always think this to myself, like,
and you may agree, it's like a lot of things that we need to do to prevent injury are the same
things we need to do to actually relieve the pain.
There's like a crossover a lot of times, right? Right. Yeah. And so it used to be, so I'll tell the
story about my grandmother. My grandmother was told that you only have so many heartbeats
in your life. And so if you're not cooking or making the bed, you need to sit down. And she had a
total shoulder replacement in her seventies.
This was a long, long time ago. She'd be well over a hundred now, but, uh, she was supposed
to go to physical therapy and she told her surgeon, well, if you didn't fix it, nobody will, but a total
shoulder, you have to have rehab or it's just going to say, so she has the last few years of her
life, she wore a sling and carried her arm around in a sling the rest of her life and so I'm glad
that we're breaking free of that mold where, where movement is healing. Right. Movement is
medicine. I know that's a, uh, you know, a program that people have that if we can can tell
ourselves in our mind, like. Don't, don't just sit down, like, let's figure out what's not working. I'm,
I'm a runner and a triathlete.
And so all the runners like to come to my office because they know I understand that if there's
any way I can avoid saying, okay, don't run for a little bit. They know I'm going to. So that I, and I
think that's really powerful to say, let's find a different mode or let's figure out what you can run
three miles before it hurts.
Okay, well, let's then run to this tape job that I'm going to do on your whatever, you know, and
just try to avoid not taking somebody out of their sport or out of their life. Is really, really
important if at all possible while they are rehab, but yeah, just sitting down usually doesn't work.
Actually, I think they think, say that, like, if somebody has back issues and they go sitting down
and lying down, it makes them like 10 times worse.
Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, yeah. Movement like we know is medicine. A hundred percent. Even if
it sounds cliche, it's the truth and it can be adaptable to like every, every mode. Like you're
saying, whether it's an athlete, you know, an extreme case that somebody that's a triathlete like
yourself or, or somebody that is just working physically, which is, you know.
The truth. We still have to maintain our bodies. Yeah, I know that the employees that we care
for, they, they work just as hard as an, as a professional athlete. They just do it day over day
over day. And they don't have, we, I just watched my kids just watched.
And I was like, wow, look at all the things they do to take care of themselves, all the healthcare
providers, the ice baths, the, you know, all of that stuff, all of the stuff to recover. And they have
that at their disposal because they're professional athletes. If we can just give them, you know, a
good portion of that, and especially the care part.
Then we're taking a really big step for industrial athletes and for caring for people, the way they
should be cared for when they have physical jobs. Yeah. That's great. So what else are, are, are
you doing like any, you know, we talked about the well lifetime. Is there anything from the
emotional, component or, or mindset component or what, what else are you doing?
Yeah, so really important we see this all the time in our clinic that people are carrying emotional
baggage around with him. Sometimes it's been from long, long, long times. And we're not
psychologists and we're not sociologists. We're not psychiatrists, we're physical therapists and
athletic trainers.
But every once in a while in the clinic, we can see somebody who's really harboring something.
Sometimes we don't see it. Sometimes we just discover it. I had this lady. That had a, uh, frozen
shoulder when I was a student and she was lovely. I mean, we had the best conversations and,
but I couldn't get that last like 20 degrees of motion for her shoulder.
So I, I said, listen, I was like, I'm going to stick my hand in your armpit, which you always have
to warm people when you're going to do that, but I'm gonna stick my hand in your armpit and I'm
going to massage the muscle that's under there because I think that's what's holding some,
something that's holding up.
So I did it and we were having a lovely conversation and she just started bawling. As a student, I
was like, Oh my gosh, did it hurt? Like, and she's like, no, it doesn't hurt. I don't know why I'm
crying. And she cried three more times. She got all her range back, but it was that emotion
locked in the muscle or the tissue or whatever.
And so for us, like we try to employ all of our patients, and with our, our industrial athletes, like.
We're going to, you're going to be in here and we're going to do exercise and manual stuff in the
clinic. And we're going to teach you how to move in the, in our companies, but you have to start
stretching.
You have to start moving. And when you're doing it, don't just do it like, okay, I'm going to like
read a book and stretch my hamstring out, or I'm going to type it straight, like focus on that,
focus on your breathing because we can certainly reduce their stress level. You know, we try to
meet people where they are in our clinic emotionally.
If somebody comes in and they're already crying, we don't come up and... Like blast them out
with positivity and get them all mad. Right. We come in, stay calm and meet them where they
are. And I think that that might be missing in healthcare today. A lot that your provider just walks
in with their computer.
They don't say who they are. I did that with my primary care the other day. I know my primary
care doctor, he's amazing, but he had a new medical assistant. She came in. Okay. What's
going on. I was like, I'm Delaine, what's your name? And, and, and so I think like, just doing
those basic skill sets of human humanizing stuff.
Watch your name, how are you doing? What's going on? you know, do you like care? You know,
you like the tar heels, right? Like in North Carolina, do you like Tars? Do you like Duke? Which
one, right? Because it's never both and like humanizing people and humanizing yourself to
connect with people emotionally.
I think that's important. I think our practice has a great reputation in our town because we take
the time to care we really do care about you. We want to know your name. We want to know
what you're really trying to get back to. Not just let's get that shoulder moving. Like why? Oh,
cause I want to be able to dance with my daughter at their wedding or whatever.
Yeah. And you're able to do that in the, in this, in the workplace too, because you're. People are
taking the time to get to know the employees. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I had a guy who,
he wouldn't lift right. He was a great employee. He was a super nice, nice guy, but he wouldn't
lift right.
And, you know, I would still like, Hey, you really should work on this. You know, I don't want you
to hurt your back. Well, after a year or two of doing it wrong, he hurt his back and he came back
and he was out of work and he came back to work a few months later. And he was like, Hey,
he's like, I don't want to do that again.
I was like, great. I don't want you to do it again. He's like, okay. I said, so just do it my way for
two weeks. And I showed him how to lift pallets properly. We sat there for 20-30 minutes just
working together. And about six weeks later, he came up to me, he's like, I can't thank you
enough. He said, I didn't realize by lifting properly, he's like, I walk faster.
He's like, I pick faster. He said, everybody's told me you can't lift properly and do this job
properly, except for you. He said, you've always said you can pick, you can do better if you lift
properly. And he's like, I didn't believe you, but now I'm picking faster than everybody. He's like,
and I walk faster.
He said, I don't have to go home and lay on the floor for 30 minutes before I play with my kids. I
was like, yes, that's powerful. So that those are the things that bring us joy and to know we're
affected. We're not just affecting that person, but their family, their, their, their, their world. So
that's really cool.
And we love it. Yeah. No, it's awesome. And it's obviously a need and your company is growing
and it sounds like you've got 10, 000 employees. So I, I like to say my claim to, why I keep
doing the things that I do, is when I, when I started my practice in Salisbury. I could care for
about 15 people a day, and that was super great.
And now we, with my whole team, care for about 10, 000 people a day. And that's just like, it
gives me chills to think about. And so we got a really big goal of 50,000 people a day. We're
going to get there and everybody's on board rowing towards the same direction, but we're
rowing for the right reason, which is caring for people.
Not, not the five minute interaction you have with your health care provider so they can build
properly for really, really doing it to stop injuries before they start teaching people how to be well
in all, all aspects of their lives, right? I have no doubt my buddy with the back pain at the
company, like we affected his mental health.
Health because we affected his physical health. We affected his emotional health because we
were affected, because we were able to, he was able to see down the line how it helped him.
That's awesome. That is great. And, and you have clients like Thomas, tell us some of your
clients. I know you have some major brands that you're working with.
So yeah, over the years we've definitely worked with lots of clients and, uh, I jokingly say I'm
Mike Rowe of Rowan County, North Carolina. So, I've been gifted to, to work with, Del Hayes
and Freightliner, uh, Jockey, Dillard's, uh, Gilbarco, and Aldi, uh, and, and so we have just loved
doing that, uh, along with a lot of other clients, a lot of other smaller businesses that, you know,
it's, it's so cool to see American made companies doing American made things and serving
America too.
You know, whenever I talk to any of our grocers that, warehousing, I say, you know, thank you
because Especially during the pandemic, like people don't understand if you haven't seen how
food gets to the stores. That's amazing. I mean, it's incredible. And so if somebody works at a
grocery store chain somewhere, please say thank you.
I don't care which one it is. Just tell them. Thank you. Because. I can't grow food, like I can't
grow a carrot, and I don't know how to hunt, so if the food wasn't on the shelves, I would be out
of luck, and my family would be out of luck, so, especially during the pandemic, I've said a lot of
thank yous to a lot of people for showing up to work.
It's important. Yeah. That's so good. And yeah, it's so great to hear and you're making a huge
difference in many people's lives.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this information. And I am going to include the
link to your website here in the episode. So if people want to reach out to you.
Thank you. Yes. And that's an easy way to get in touch with any of us. I have a LinkedIn profile
as well, and happy to message me on there.
Excellent. And we'll put that in this episode too. And thank you again, Delaine for coming on and
remember we do new episodes every week on Wednesday and I look forward to having you join me then.
