Pediatric Boulevard

Awful experience! Physical therapy for a young child under 1 or any age child, should never be painful or frightening. Children need to be handled delicately, as negative experiences could hurt a child not only physically but mentally.



So my personal experience:

My 6 month old was in to be treated for Torticollis, aka a twisted neck condition caused by weakened or stiff muscles. If you've ever had a severely stiff neck in your life, you would know that you cannot force the neck to turn, instead you need to gradually loosen that muscle by working the muscle. Well, my 6 month old very happy baby who never knew pain, discomfort or fear before this visit experienced it all in the 35 minutes that we were here for our very FIRST VISIT EVER!



When going for this visit, we knew to expect discomfort as they would be stretching a muscle that has not been used often. The key word here is "discomfort". Once the level of discomfort came to the point of bright red face, full body sweat from then intense screaming, and gagging to the point of almost vomiting, I think a PEDIATRIC THERAPIST should have known my 6 month old was in more than "discomfort" and should not have continued to FORCE HOLD HIS HEAD DOWN for a minute interval. I questioned asking couldn't we do lesser intervals since he was so distressed, maybe gradually work him to that one minute. But instead I was told, he is not in pain and he just doesn't like what she was doing. Regardless if he was in pain or "just didn't like what she was doing" how about not forcing him to continue for 60 long seconds as this 6 month old had fear and pain written all over his face!



I would NEVER bring my infant or anyone's infant back to this place! To me, they broke my level of trust by forcing my 6 month while he was showing such discomfort. Once you lose my trust with my child, you don't get another chance to fix it because I shouldn't have to tell a therapist how to treat a child, it should come naturally, which it did not!