Meet Aimee Bennett and Lauren Paradiso | Doctors of Physical Therapy

We had the good fortune of connecting with Aimee Bennett and Lauren Paradiso and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Aimee and Lauren, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
We created Empower Postpartum Physical Therapy because, as mothers, we learned firsthand what little support and guidance our current healthcare model provides to pregnant and postpartum women. After becoming mothers, we felt compelled to try and help change the standard of care provided to women in the fourth trimester. Our goal is to increase the education and information available to women in regards to what happens to their bodies during pregnancy and postpartum as well as how to safely exercise while pregnant and while trying to get back into exercise after birth. Our hope is that Empower Postpartum PT will help make both pregnancy and postpartum the enjoyable, amazingly life changing experience it should be.

The American Academy of Obstetrics and Gynecology revised its guidelines in 2020 stating that within the first day postpartum, most women can safely engage in pelvic floor, lower abdominal drawing in, and breathing exercises, yet most women are still told to not exercise in any way until cleared at their 6-8 week follow up. This leaves a lot of time for potential further tissue damage to occur increasing your risk for incontinence, prolapse, diastasis recti, and more. We view every pregnancy and delivery as an orthopedic trauma to a woman’s body and it deserves to be treated as such.

For example, if you were to go out for a walk and sprain your ankle, you would go see an orthopedic doctor and they would likely refer you to physical therapy to help you make a full recovery. It is common practice to be sent to physical therapy if you sustain an injury to any part of your body, except for women sustaining pelvic floor and abdominal injuries after birth. Every day women are suffering trauma either through vaginal delivery or cesarean yet these women are expected to not only take care of their injuries alone, without any guidance but also take care of a newborn and all of the challenges that are associated with that.

Women have enough stress and responsibility on their plates. We created Empower Postpartum Physical therapy to help decrease the stress, burden, and isolation women feel during this early postpartum period and help shed light on the fact that we can help to educate women, empower women, and give them the confidence to return to any and all activities that they want.

Under the care and guidance of Doctors of Physical therapy, who specialize in pregnant and postpartum women, we offer in- home private treatment sessions to women who are pregnant, early postpartum or at any stage in their postpartum journey to help them establish a solid understanding of their bodies capabilities, what is normal and what is not, and how to safely return to exercise with confidence.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
We are not like a traditional Physical Therapy office. One of the main ways we are set apart from others is that we come into our client’s home. We decided to start this type of practice to help make it easier for women to get the care they deserve. We did not want them to have to figure out childcare or how they were going to go out around nap time which ultimately just creates another barrier to care. We also spend one on one time with our clients for 45 minutes. Our clients get our undivided attention giving them optimal care. Most PT clinics have one therapist balancing multiple people at one time. There is limited one-on-one time with the therapist resulting in a patient getting less direction and guidance as they complete exercises. We have worked in this type of environment and know how much more of a positive impact we can have on people’s lives if we just had the time.

We both started our careers in orthopedics which was how we initially met each other. We realized we had similar stories of getting back to working out after having a baby. We were both experienced working with athletes and both kind of just assumed it would be easy for us to “rehab ourselves.” Well …it did not work like that. We decided to dedicate ourselves to women’s health and took advanced classes that specifically focused on pregnant and postpartum patients to be able to give more women the personalized care they deserve. Advancing our skill set has been the easy part. We are now able to combine our knowledge of orthopedics and pelvic health to treat the body as a whole yielding optimal results. The business side of starting your own company has been an interesting journey. Business development is definitely not either of our strong points, but we have grown to love our new roles as business women and doctors of physical therapy.

As cliche as it sounds, we are most excited about helping to make a positive impact in women’s lives and hopefully, healthcare as a whole as well as to get some balance back into our own lives. We have been the patient who had limited guidance when returning to life after a child and didn’t know where to turn. Everything is new; your body, your day to day tasks, not to mention, attempting to navigate everything while sleep deprived. We want to help take some of the burden off of women by providing quality care when we need it most.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Our fun times have changed just a little since having kids so if one of our friends visited it would still involve a lot of our family time. We enjoy spending a lot of time in downtown Alpharetta and Roswell. Early mornings at the farmer’s market in Alpharetta on Saturdays are generally how we begin the weekend. We are able to get some yummy coffee at Valor, get our veggies for the week, and then let the kids run around so we can actually enjoy warm coffee! In the afternoons we would go back to downtown Alpharetta and get some lunch, we love Butcher and Brew. Since most of the day is still spent trying to find a way to tire out our kids, we would let our kids run around in the green space and through the splash pad while we enjoy some cocktails from Chiringa. When we get the chance to go to dinner, we love Table and Main as well as Osteria Mattone in Roswell. We also take full advantage of the wonderful parks we have around us (again more areas to tire out our kids!). We have also spent mornings walking along the Roswell Riverwalk and stopping to play at the park or in the splash pad. Another one of our favorite parks is Roswell Area Park. It is perfectly shaded to help alleviate some of the heat. They have a zip line swing that my kids will spend hours riding on.
Outside of Roswell and Alpharetta nothing can beat the aquarium. We have spent so many hours walking around and taking in everything. It is one of our and our kids’ favorite places to visit.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
First off, we want to give a huge shoutout to our husbands for believing in us, sometimes, more than we believed in ourselves. They helped to encourage us to follow our passion and continue to step up when needed to care for our children without complaint while we worked weekends and late nights as we got our business started. We also want to acknowledge all the professionals out there who are trying to pave the way and improve Womens Health. Mothers just like us are breaking boundaries and trying to transition pelvic floor PT from a more passive manual-based field to hands on dynamic functional training helping women achieve long-term success.

Website: empowerpostpartumpt.com

Instagram: @empowerpostpartumpt

Facebook: @empowerpostpartumpt

Image Credits
Sam Bennett, Cutting Edge Images, Inc.