New challenges – and opportunities to help – brought Brittany Roberts into physical therapy, and they’re what inspire her to keep serving every day.
A native of southeast Kansas, Roberts grew up playing sports in school. The experience led her desire to work with athletes, but it soon expanded beyond that specific concentration.
“I wanted to work with athletes and help get them back into sports, but then I found physical therapy because I just liked the diversity of it,” she says. “Just meeting new people and new things; every day is different.”
Roberts got her undergraduate degree in Iowa at William Penn University, where she met her husband. The couple moved to Bolivar, where she earned her doctorate of physical therapy (DPT) at Southwest Baptist University. After a couple of years working in Mountain View, she ultimately made the move to West Plains and has been at Physical Therapy Specialists Clinic since 2020.
Roberts’ husband is from the area, but Roberts says she enjoys working in a rural area for the variety of needs it sees.
“I’ve always worked in rural areas, because you see a little bit of everything,” she says. “I’ve worked with orthopedics. I’ve worked with vestibular. I’ve worked with patients after surgeries, and patients who are dealing with dizziness. I’ve even seen a couple of pediatric patients. I enjoy the constant change in a rural setting. There’s no telling what will walk in the door.
“You learn so much from patients, different people, and it’s just what I grew up in. There’s only 500 people in the town I grew up in so I’ve never lived in a big city.”
In her work, Roberts enjoys helping people with a variety of issues and helping them improve their quality of life. While she treats patients with diverse needs, she also specializes in LSVT Big therapy.
“LSVT Big is a program for individuals with Parkinson’s. Gradually over time, patients with Parkinson’s kind of ‘shrink’ in themselves and move less. It helps them get back into their ‘normal’ as things were before Parkinson’s started taking things from them,” she says.
Another area of Roberts’ specialization focuses on dry needling, a pain-management technique.
“Dry needling is more of a pain relief for soft tissue,” she says. “It helps those muscles relax, and reset themselves to where people can get back into moving again without pain.”
Brittany Roberts has her doctorate in physical therapy, is a LSVT Big therapist, and is Dry Needling Level 1 therapist.