Today we’d like to introduce you to Tim & Jessica Cummings.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
We have been practicing physical therapy for the last 11 years. We have seen radical changes in the healthcare industry during this time that have been hard for our clients and for us as providers.
A few years into our professional careers it became clear that health insurance companies were more concerned with profit margins than their clients or the healthcare providers trying to help these clients.
In 2017, we founded Restore/Thrive, a performance-based physical therapy practice focused on working with active individuals and athletes. Our mission at Restore/Thrive is to help our clients grow strong and age gracefully by providing exceptional physical therapy and preventive services.
We believe that our clients should not just recover during their care with us, but THRIVE. We believe our clients should be empowered with a greater understanding of how to maintain and improve their physical health.
Everyone deserves the time to tell their story. Our clients have hour-long appointments with us during every visit. We don’t pass our clients off to techs or aides. Each of our clients has direct access to their provider. Our clients get 100% of our focus and effort. Our mission is to provide exceptional physical therapy and wellness services to the Kansas City metro for many years to come.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Spending years dealing with insurance companies telling us how to treat our clients and how many times our clients could use our services took a heavy toll on us as healthcare providers, leaving us frustrated and exhausted most days.
Our business has been so successful that often wish we had started our business long before we did but looking back, we realize there was no clear roadmap to help us navigate this path.
Now we recognize that doing something completely different from the norm is really hard. We are thankful for the many years of experience we had as employees prior to owning a business. Our past experiences, both good and bad, helped refine our grit, determination, and character. It set us up well for success when we finally did open our own practice. Negative and positive experiences both shape you, though it seems it is the negative experiences that shape us the most in the long run if we’re willing to look closely at the reasons for those outcomes.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We regularly get questions about physical therapy. Many people don’t really know what we do. They may have had a bad experience in the past, or their grandma just had physical therapy after a surgery or a fall and they don’t realize there are more things we can treat other than just falls and post-surgical cases.
We work with a lot of people suffering from problems with their low back, neck, mid-back, shoulders, hips, and knees-just to name a few. We also help people with a history of headaches, concussions, and certain vestibular conditions. We view these problems through the lens of human movement. We can tell a lot about your body just by watching you squat, hinge, step up, and lunge with your lower body or press and pull with your upper body
Our job at your first session with us is to really get to the root cause of your problem. For example, if you have pain in your shoulder there could be 20 different things wrong with your shoulder or your neck could be referring pain to your shoulder. How do you tell the difference? Our clinical background helps us be precise during the exam and with our recommendations. Depending on your problem, there are different treatment strategies, pain relief techniques, and home exercise programs that are needed.
We founded Restore/Thrive because we recognized that treating the whole person by taking the time to talk with them about their sleep habits, nutrition and hydration, work and family life, and stress management strategies helped us bridge the gap between simply being pain-free and being able to perform at a higher level. Early on in our physical therapy careers, we noticed that once our clients were out of pain, there was still a gap to cross to get back to their sport or an active lifestyle without risk of re-injury. We discovered that using the principles of strength and conditioning helped empower our clients to perform at a level that they may not even have reached prior to their injury.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Invest in yourself. Whether you are inside or outside the world of physical therapy, proactively working to improve your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being pays off. We are able to serve our clients and our families well when we have a full tank. When we fail to take care of ourselves everyone is affected.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://www.restorethrive.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/restorethrive/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/restorethrive
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0fas-Ar2L_x2xqEACKho7g
- Other: https://anchor.fm/healthykcpodcast
