Health Mettler Institute

When 4-yr-outdated Kate McKenzie was identified with a uncommon variety of epilepsy, her prognosis was grim. Health professionals explained to her mother, Katie, that Kate may possibly hardly ever stroll or chat. 

“It is catastrophic. It can even lead to dying,” Katie McKenzie said. 

But when McKenzie took her daughter to Pediatric Fingers on Treatment in Gastonia, that appointment was various.

“They ended up just like a breath of contemporary air and positivity, which is what I desperately wanted,” she claimed. “They ended up like, ‘We feel in you. We think in Kate. This is what we can do.'”

Pediatric Palms on Treatment, which is owned by occupational therapist Freida Poag, has been in enterprise in Gastonia given that 2008. Poag, nonetheless, has been an occupational therapist considering that 1997. As a boy or girl, she would see little ones coming and heading from a therapy exercise in Charlotte, and she claimed that working experience inspired her to grow to be an occupational therapist herself.

“I love functioning with little ones, and it was just constantly a dream of mine,” Poag mentioned. 

When the clinic opened in 2008, it started out out with residence visits. Poag opened a clinic on South New Hope Street. In 2014, they moved into a distinct creating in the same business office complicated.

Then, in April 2021, a setting up that previously housed a dental clinic experienced a fire, and Poag and her partner, Bradley, purchased the complete complicated in hopes of renovating the building into a new, more substantial room and growing the clinic.

The new area, found on Pembroke Highway in Gastonia, is a lot more than 7,000 square ft, and it has permitted Poag to insert 4 added therapists to her employees and create a sensory gym for small children that occur for remedy. 

The clinic solutions shoppers from start to age 21 with a variety of disabilities — cerebral palsy, autism, Down syndrome, spina bifida, and feeding problems, to identify a number of. 

“The sensory fitness center will allow us to supply treatment using a sensory integrative approach.  All disciplines — bodily treatment, occupational therapy and speech treatment — adore supplying remedy in the new health and fitness center,” Poag said. 

Poag stated that she hopes to expand her observe into the encompassing region.

“This is all I have at any time carried out. The enthusiasm to assist others, I have had that my overall life,” Poag claimed. “I assume I’ve just always been drawn to aiding others that are various.”

For Katie McKenzie and her daughter, Poag’s clinic has been a godsend. 

Kate McKenzie, now 4, goes to the clinic quite a few instances a 7 days for care. Immediately after she experienced a setback that necessary brain operation, the therapists at Pediatric Hands on Therapy served her get back simple actual physical competencies.

“Following her mind surgical procedures she experienced, she shed a good deal of her skills. She even wasn’t able to sit up, and they rehabbed her thoroughly back. They obtained her back again to going for walks. She’s chatting. She’s in college — so a lot of matters that we had been advised that they just did not know what her future would be,” McKenzie stated.

By Kate’s wellness challenges, Pediatric Hands on Remedy has been her family’s largest aid, McKenzie explained.