Why I Do This Work

Most people don't plan a career around watching someone they love get failed by the system. I did.

Like a lot of exercise science graduates, I started out assuming I'd end up in physiotherapy. It's the well-worn path — you study sport and exercise science, then funnel toward physio, or something adjacent. I was on that track too, until my brother hurt his back at work.

He went through the usual rotation: chiropractors, physios, osteopaths. Nobody could get him past it. Then he saw an exercise physiologist, and that was the turning point — they got him functional again when three other professions hadn't. I remember thinking, there's something real here. I need to understand this properly.

That's what pushed me into a Master's in rehabilitation. Not a grand career plan — just wanting to understand what had actually worked for my brother when everything else hadn't.

Finding the caseload that stuck

Early on I focused on cardiovascular rehab, but over time I found myself drawn into neurological and autoimmune work — patients with MS, Parkinson's, stroke recovery. It's the kind of caseload where progress is measured differently, and where the work genuinely doesn't feel like a job most days.

The accident that led me to Chiropractic

Years later, a go-kart collision left me with whiplash — the kind where you feel fine the next day, then wake up the day after with every segment in your back seizing up, one after another. It was the worst pain I'd experienced. I eventually saw a chiropractor, and the relief was immediate and real — not the "fixes you for a day" stereotype I'd assumed going in.

That experience is what led me to study Chiropractic myself, on top of my EP training. It wasn't a smooth fit at first — chiropractic training leans toward adjustment as the default tool, and I kept finding myself reaching for a muscle release or an exercise prescription instead. But that tension turned into the thing I now think is my biggest strength: having more than one tool in the shed. If someone isn't a good candidate for an adjustment, that's not the end of the conversation — there's still a rehab pathway available.

That line has become the closest thing I have to a personal philosophy. Not "get back to the job as fast as possible" — get the person functioning as a human being first, and the return-to-work conversation follows naturally from there. It's the thread running through everything Aim High Rehab does, whether that's a workplace claim, a complex neurological case, or someone just trying to get back to picking up their kids without pain.