PT Q&A: Andrew Charney

I went into my undergrad undecided. I knew I liked exercise and activity, but the only thing I knew at that point is that I wanted to work with people. Typing on a computer just frustrated me. I wanted to be mobile. I really like moving throughout the day; I would go crazy at a desk job. 

My oldest sister, Sam, is a physical therapist. In my freshman year, I job-shadowed with her while she was treating a patient who had Lyme disease. He had trouble walking, and his goal was to be able to walk his niece down the aisle at her wedding. I thought that was so cool that she got to help someone do that. 

My sister then set me up with her friend who worked as a tech at a clinic. I got a job there and fell in love with it. I worked there for three-and-a-half years, starting as a tech and moving up into a head tech position. 

The owner of the clinic, Bryan, was a good mentor for me as I was trying to figure out what I might like to do in the field. He taught me a lot about the profession as a whole and the things that make up good patient care. Everything comes back to interpersonal communication—your ability to have a conversation with someone. Bryan showed me that that is the foundation upon which you build your clinical reasoning. If you can't connect with someone, then they're never going to listen to anything that you tell them to do anyway. Once I saw him interacting with patients, I finally was like, “I definitely want to do this. I would be good at this.”

We did quite a bit of intramural sports: co-ed flag football, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball. I didn't play my second year of flag football, but they got to play in Kinnick for the intramural championships, so we all went. There were probably like 30 or 40 of us. The PT student team got absolutely destroyed by a bunch of undergraduates, but it was a lot of fun. 

 

As for student orgs, I was a part of the job fair we put on in March every year. First- and second-years get a chance to attend and connect with companies in the area across at least four states. You get to meet the people who will be your clinical instructors at that time too, so that's beneficial—to have a face-to-face so you know what to expect.   

 

The other thing that I participated in was University of Iowa Mobile Clinic. That was awesome. I really, really enjoyed working with the interdisciplinary team. It's fun when you're going through school to be able to apply it a little bit. Sometimes you're deep in the forest looking at all the trees, and you forget to zoom out and realize why you're learning everything.

Two of the people that were super great mentors for all of us were Marcie Becker [DPT, GCS] and Kelly Sass [PT, PhD]. If you're having a bad day, you would go to either Marcie or Kelly, and they would talk you off the ledge and tell you that it was going to be OK. 

Dave Williams [PhD, MPT, ATC, CSCS] teaches our orthopedic courses, so for the last three semesters, you’re with him for six or seven hours a week. He can come off strong at times, but everything he said was right. You sit there as a student and you're like, “Well, I don't know if it has to be that way.” And then you get out into clinical care and you're like, “I don't know why I doubted him.” 

Richard Shields [PT, PhD, FAPTA] was my research advisor. We worked on a project seeing if you can train someone to respond to perturbations, meaning like sudden changes. So, for example, let's say you're walking along, and you slip and fall on a banana peel. That sudden loss of support of your one limb could be called a “perturbation.” 

 

We studied this using an upper extremity device where you move your arm back and forth while you're looking at a screen and trying to trace a sinusoidal wave curve. As you go one way, it goes down, and as you go the other way, it goes up. Then there's a brake with a measured resistance on it. As you're going one way, the brake would release, and you would overshoot and then compensate as quickly as possible to get back onto the curve. The goal was to see whether, if you did training with that performance, if you could measure response in a healthy population and measure improvements. 

 

If you can detect change over time, you could create an objective measure of, let's say, fall risk prevention and then see how that differs between different neurological pathologies, ages, and things like that.

When we first met that first summer, we did a get-together, and it's funny to think back on now. We were just 50 strangers then. At the end of our schooling, we all knew each other so well. You’re lab partners with random people; you just get to know everyone. You get past a lot of your personal barriers when you go to ortho classes with all of your classmates at once. 

 

We had Halloween parties and Christmas parties. We had a Friendsgiving. Our class size is 48, so it’s decently big, but we would regularly have like 40 people whenever we did anything. It was fun. 

What drew me into the profession is the level of relationship that you can develop with patients in PT because you're seeing them for longer visits. You start to understand their complaints and their point of view a lot easier than in a 15-minute visit.   

 

That puts us in a very unique position in the health care world where we are able to improve their quality of life by targeting their true wants, desires, and complaints and then advocating for them. Already, in my limited clinical practice, I can tell you that with nearly every single patient, we are at some point going over something a doctor told them or some confusion about a medication—something that they either don't feel comfortable asking during their doctor’s appointments, or that they just didn’t think about until now.  

 

I really enjoy being that patient advocate and being able to develop that meaningful relationship with them to help them through a holistic approach. Instead of saying, “Okay, you're weak, let's get stronger,” you can say, “You want to walk your niece down the aisle at her wedding. Let’s figure out a way that we can do that.” 

 

Plus, you're up on your feet all day, and it's fun to do exercise. Most people, believe it or not, feel better once they do exercise, and then you become the good guy. 

I accepted a job at Kinetic Edge Physical Therapy in Ames. My fiancée, Riley, is a vet student at Iowa State, so that’s why I'm drawn to the Ames area. A little bit of a divided house, but that's OK. We manage. Riley and I are looking forward to getting married in May 2026.  

 

Shout out to my dog, Bruce! He’s my little buddy.