Dr. Chelsea Leahy is connecting people to their bodies and health care in deeper, different ways.
The 29-year-old Oneonta resident launched Connect Physical Therapy at 107 Winney Hill Road in Oneonta in April 2021. Leahy owns the practice, though she works alongside doctors Brianna Utter and Emily Schmitt. Leahy said she’s tried always to employ a comprehensive approach to physical therapy.
“When I moved to Oneonta, I noticed there was a need for more physical therapy services and, specifically, a quality care that I was taught in school and was having a hard time finding,” she said. “So, I decided to start my own practice to try to focus on maintaining the high-quality care I was taught and that patients deserved. Although there were a lot of challenges with that, it’s been extremely rewarding to see people’s lives changed through physical therapy.
“I think a lot of people have an idea in their head of what physical therapy is, because, for so many years, it’s been traditional physical therapy, where you come in, do your exercises and then leave,” Leahy continued. “With us, you come in and you work one-on-one with your doctor of physical therapy — not an aide — for the entire 40 minutes to an hour and what we really focus on is building a connection … through not just the physical impairments, but understanding their whole life and how other factors may be affecting. It’s ‘let’s treat that, instead of just isolating the one thing that hurts,’ and that’s where the name came from.”
Leahy called such a holistic method “the foundation of what I do.”
“From my schooling, I had a large background in pain neuroscience education,” she said. “I take pain science and apply it to every single patient I see, and then the next level is the biomechanics, but you have to have a true understanding of pain science, which brings in the whole body and says, basically, that our pain is not developed by one biomechanical factor; it’s developed by how much our brain is processing. That’s how stressed are we?, what’s your family situation like?, what’s your previous understanding of what’s going on with you?, what did society tell you about your pain and you believe is true?, what’s your job? And it’s not just fluffy stuff; it’s the power of the brain and having a better understanding of your situation.
“It is a newer (school of) thought, but at the same time, Oneonta deserves it,” Leahy continued. “There’s no practice that is practicing this way; everything is the traditional model and there’s a lot of people that live here and the people deserve to have this progressive treatment instead of the old.”
Leahy said clients are responding positively to her practices.
“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that they’ve come from another clinic or a different private practice and say they haven’t gotten the one-on-one like they have here,” she said. “They love the relationships that we develop. It’s not just ‘Hey, come in and do your exercises,’ but developing a true connection with your physical therapist. We get cards in the mail all the time and cookies and things. I think people have fun here; we have a basketball hoop hanging from the ceiling and people ask, ‘why?’ but I said, ‘why not?,’ because it makes physical therapy fun. And we don’t use that just for basketball players, but we use it in balance training for adults, because PT should not be boring, and a lot of people have that experience. Even we, as physical therapists, want to have fun, so of course our patients should have fun, too, and that’s a lot of our feedback: ‘I just love coming here.’”
And patients, Leahy said, represent a mix.
“We kind of have a 30-mile radius,” she said. “We have people from Stamford, Delhi area and there’s some coming from close to Binghamton, because Emily is a pelvic floor specialist. I would say our youngest (patient) is like 15 and our oldest has been 95. Emily sees a lot of women’s health-related population and Briana sees a lot of geriatric, for balance training and general conditioning and neurologic conditions like stroke and Parkinson’s, and I see a lot of orthopedic cases and chronic pain cases, and that’s a huge range.”
Leahy said she hopes to broaden her reach while remaining local.
“I would love to continue providing high-quality care to the people of Oneonta and the surrounding areas and, if there are people on the same wavelength with the same goals, I’d love to continue growing as a team so we can reach more people with that same care,” she said. “I don’t know what that looks like, because it changes every week, and it’s really cool to see. When I first came here, I think things felt a little dull in Oneonta. But, across the board, there are people in the community that are filling this need, which is amazing.”
Leahy said she is accepting new patients and said Connect Physical Therapy is in network with Medicare and will “provide superbills for other insurances, for reimbursement.”
For more information, email info@connectptny.com, visit connectptny.com or follow @connectptny on Instagram.