Meet Dr Danny, Physical Therapist at CORE Therapy and Pilates in Westlake Hills now taking Medicare

Meet Dr Danny, Physical Therapist at CORE Therapy and Pilates in Westlake Hills now taking Medicare

All right. So hey guys. What's up? It's Stephen Dunn and I want to introduce our newest member to the team. We have Dr Daniel Masters, Physical Therapist that just joined us last week. So first of all welcome to the team Dr. Danny.

Oh thank you, thank you very much, Stephen. It's good to be here.

And so many of you, some of you at some point, Danny was here about five or six years ago, not exactly sure as a student before he got into PT school. So there's a handful of you at some point through the process of him being here for that summer, that you met him along the way. Well, now he's back as a PT. He's been working and as a PT out in Austin, in central Austin and I wanted to introduce him to the team because we brought him on board. One of the things that I'm excited about is he's a local Westlake kid. He went to UT. I'm a geaux tigers, but he went to UT, I'll give him credit for that. He went to college, PT school at…

Texas Women's…

Texas Women's in Houston, right?

In Houston, correct.

So tell us a little bit about growing up in Westlake and Austin and going to PT school in Texas... 

Oh yeah, well you know, it's been great. You know, going to Westlake definitely got exposed to you know, a really good education, got to see a lot, got a lot of really good opportunities, you know. UT was great, got to really meet a whole bunch of different people, got to study a whole bunch of different kinds of things and you know studying in TWU in Houston was really fascinating because I was in the medical center, got exposed to a lot of different people, a lot of different diagnoses and all that kind of stuff…

Got it.

Now before we start talking about PT, before you became a PT in between UT and TWU there was a little detour into a different direction. Tell us about that for a moment because I think that's interesting...

Yeah so after college I ended up actually just kind of falling into this position. I started substitute teaching and then I ended up becoming a PE teacher for about three years…

Got It…

So I did elementary school…

And that was here in Austin?

That was here in Austin, correct…

Got it, got it.

So I didn't mean detour in any negative way, I just want to be clear, and the reason I say that is because now he's in a very different work situation, a different educational situation than he was at that time when he was actually serving in the education system. So now you've been out of PT school for a little while, you've got some experience working in a busy orthopedic clinic before you came here and from our conversation, it sounds like you've worked a lot with shoulders, a lot with backs and a lot with knees. Which you know, we as PTs we see a little bit of everything…

Right…

But that's what you've kind of had the most experience with over the last couple of years.

Now with that said, what are some of the things that people complain about like with their shoulder? What would you say are some of the real common things that people talk about?

Yeah, so the real common thing that I've seen a lot with shoulders is problems with reaching overhead. So trying to grab stuff out of the top shelf, lifting things, picking things up from the ground they get this pain slash pinching. Sometimes people call it like a catching kind of like right here…

Now, what muscle is that that you're pointing to right there?

So that's that is the deltoid.

Now it's not the deltoid that's the problem though, right? What's typically the problem like they're pointing to right where the deltoid attaches to the humerus but where is the problem typically coming from?

So usually this is a pretty typical issue with shoulders. It's called impingement and a lot of the time one of the rotator cuff muscles or maybe even the bursa that's inside the shoulder gets kind of pinched…

Got it, got it and again we see this all the time. It's like you go to reach and then it pinches it here but the pain refers down to here. Sometimes it's athletes when they're serving in tennis, throwing a baseball, throwing anything overhead. All of that's going to create that whether we're talking to the young athlete or the mom or grandma who's reaching into the cabinet, reaching into the hamper to deal with laundry. It's the idea that no matter what age you are that reaching can be compromised but we see it a lot in the elderly population. Let's talk about that.

What's the solution if someone were to go to their orthopedic doctor and they're having pain with that shoulder with reaching, what's typically going to be their solution?

So typically it'll be some kind of medication management or they'll do some kind of cortisone or steroid shot to kind of calm down that inflammation…

So they're basically supporting the pharmacology industry by giving pharmacological agents to the patient and you know that's pretty common. Maybe they end up doing an MRI and doing some imaging. Maybe they're talking about some kind of surgery because they find a partial tear of the tendon that's causing that problem…

Right…

But now as physical therapists we approach it very differently.

So what would we do to try to help someone let's say with a partial tear of a rotator cuff? 

That we know from the research is going to be in the same place a few years later if they have the surgery or they have physical therapy only. The general population doesn't know that and the doctors don't tell them that so let's talk about that for a moment…

Yeah, you were talking about most of the research points to about two years compared conservative treatment which would be more physical therapy versus surgery, the outcomes are about the same. So you know going down the physical therapy route will definitely save money for sure but then you'll also save a lot of hassle with the shoulder surgeries because they take a while…

They are not fun…

No, they're not very fun at all. Typically doing a thorough evaluation figuring out what structure it is. What issues that you're having? What things are making it worse? What things kind of make it feel better? Where are the muscle imbalances? Maybe a lot of it can be postural as well, so figuring that out and then coming up with a detailed treatment plan and approach to target those imbalances or those postural faults. Basically retraining your body to be able to work around it…

Perfect, I love that. Now I know we're talking about the shoulders and we're going to I'm just going to say one more thing we'll wrap it up but let's talk about the knees for a second.

What did you just mention that sounds a lot like meniscus surgery? The research is pretty similar, right?

Yeah pretty similar for sure, yeah…

For the shoulder tendon repair... Right... Versus the knee meniscus repair? Right... That someone has with the scope has pretty similar outcomes two years after the surgery versus two years after physical therapy…

Correct, yeah...

So I just want to reiterate that. So like we're the conservative treatment guys and the surgeons are the guys that are going to give you the shots, they're going to give you the oral medications, and again they may do a surgical procedure. But we're going to come at you from a totally different perspective. Coming from a natural solution that you can reproduce at home to continue to progress, you can reproduce in the gym or different settings, reproduce it in the pilates studio, whatever it might be. So with that said I want to thank you for coming on board, it's my first local Westlake kid and my first Texas kid and you know I can't wait for LSU and Texas to play each other now that he's here.

So we want to welcome Danny. If you're around the studio seeing me or seeing Dr. Andy, say hi to Dr. Danny. One of Danny's favorites is Dudley and it's funny I shared a video or I've recorded a blog with Danny on his last day here when he was a student, about six years ago or whatnot, five years ago or whatever it was and the first thing he mentioned in that video was how much Dudley was his buddy and how much he loved Dudley...

We're still buds…

Then when Danny came in the first day for him and I just to start having a conversation about him working for me, Dudley went bonkers. If you've been around lately, you know Stella is crazy and she kind of steals the spotlight, nah Dudley stole it all that moment. He went crazy! So with that said, thanks for watching guys.

Give us a call 512-215-4227 to get on the book. Dr. Danny is now accepting new medicare patients. Reach out for more information and we'll talk to you guys soon, take care.