I’ll begin this Blog page by introducing myself. My name is Ben Engelhart and I am a Doctor of Physical Therapy. Just before finishing PT school at University of Maryland I played semi-professional baseball overseas. Upon returning and completing school I worked in a couple of different types of PT clinics. I’ve worked with athletes including Olympians, elite triathletes and competitive baseball players. Recreational athletes, weekend warriors and geriatric patients whom I’ve had to help walk home (this happens when you work in NYC). I enjoy working with patients of all shapes, sizes and ages because it provides a variety of issues to be addressed. The underlying challenge for me however, is ‘how I can help this person’. This is what I went to school for and this is how I like to spend my time, helping others.
Growing up, I always loved sports and got into fitness in middle school. I went from not making the basketball team in 7th grade, to being the captain in 8th grade. I found so much satisfaction in this transformation that it became a regular occurrence that classmates would ask me what they could do to be healthier, or lose weight. I would teach them what I knew at the time and try to inspire them to make a change.
For me, a lot of happiness comes from feeling good about oneself and being healthy. I find my ‘low times’ are when I’m not regularly working out or when I have an ache or pain that startles me or scares me.
Now that I am a physical therapist, I have the ability to help people by sharing my knowledge. This can be done in person, but in can also be done through this new thing called the ‘world wide web’. So, my pledge is to write about common aches/pains/injuries as a way of helping people to better understand their body and manage issues when they come up.
