On 61st Street since 2011
About the practice
Five licensed physical therapists, five rooms, and sixty-minute one-to-one appointments. The whole clinic is arranged around that one decision, and everything else on this page follows from it.
The decision the whole clinic is built on
An hour, one patient, one licensed therapist, in a room with the door shut. That sounds like a detail and it is actually the whole business model, because the alternative — three patients an hour on staggered starts, with the clinician moving between them and an assistant or an aide covering the gaps — is roughly three times as profitable per hour of clinician time.
We do not do it that way, and the honest reason is not that we are more virtuous. It is that the treatment that works is somebody qualified watching you move and changing what you are doing. Everything else that fills a physical therapy hour in this country — the heat pack, the ultrasound head, the twenty minutes on a machine — exists because it can happen without a clinician present, which is precisely why the evidence for it is so thin.
An open floor, not a row of cubicles
The gym here is one room with the light coming in, rather than eight curtained bays. That is deliberate too. Rehabilitation is exercise, exercise is not a private act, and a space that looks like a small gym rather than a treatment corridor changes what people expect to be doing in it.
The exception is the five treatment rooms, which are private and which is where the hands-on work and the pelvic health service happen. There is no pool, so there is no aquatic therapy on this site — where water-based work is genuinely right we will tell you where to find it.
Why this website reads the way it does
Because this trade's problem is not that it lies about prices. It is that the treatments which bill best are frequently the ones with the weakest evidence, and that most patients have never been told who is legally allowed to treat them. Both of those are fixable by saying them out loud, at some cost to us.
So this site publishes the number of visits every condition usually takes, before you contact anybody. It explains why we will not sell you a discounted block of twelve. It says what the World Health Organization and NICE actually conclude about the ultrasound machine you have probably been treated with. And it names the things we are not allowed to do in this state, including one that a number of clinics here still advertise.
What we will not do
We will not treat you for six weeks to reach a conclusion available in the first hour. We will not describe a session as one-to-one time on a bill when a clinician was in another room. We will not sell you a prepaid block that makes it awkward to tell you that you are better. And we will not keep treating a problem that has stopped responding — at visit four we either change the plan or we send you back to a physician, and we say which.
The arrangement, in full
What an hour here actually buys
Sixty minutes, one to one
The same named therapist, in their own room, every visit. Not a shared hour with a clinician moving between three of you.
A licensed therapist, always
Only a licensed physical therapist may evaluate you or change your plan. That is the law, and here it is also who is in the room.
A course length, in writing
How many visits we think this takes, given at the first appointment, and published on every condition page before you contact us.
Reassessed at visit four
The same measurements repeated. If nothing has moved, the plan changes or you go back to a physician. We do not book another block and hope.
Codes on request
Any visit, no reason needed: the codes, the units and what was done in each. A bill you cannot check is one you are asked to take on trust.
No borrowed authority
No board certifications claimed, no accreditation seals, no star ratings and no before-and-after photographs. The only checkable credential is a public licence record.
Only a licensed therapist may evaluate you or change your plan. A licensed physical therapist evaluates you, writes your programme and changes it. A physical therapist assistant may carry out that programme under on-site supervision but is barred by law from evaluating you, interpreting anything or altering the plan. A physical therapy aide is unlicensed and may not provide physical therapy at all — an aide books appointments and cleans equipment. If you have ever been handed to somebody in a polo shirt who counted your repetitions while the therapist worked in another room, you have seen the thing this rule exists to stop.
We do not sell blocks of visits in advance. We do not sell blocks of visits in advance. A prepaid package of twelve sessions gives the clinic a reason to use all twelve and gives you a reason to attend appointments you no longer need, and it converts the single most useful sentence in this trade — you are better, stop coming — into a refund conversation. You pay per visit, and the visit you do not need is the one we cancel.
Sixty minutes, one to one, with the therapist you chose
Book an appointment
The booking page shows each therapist's own diary rather than a generic grid, so a slot you can see is a slot that is genuinely free. Most people do not need a doctor's referral to start — New York's direct access law runs to ten visits or thirty days — though Workers' Compensation, No-Fault and Medicare each need one from the first visit. If you are not sure which of those you are, telephone and we will work it out before you book.