Healthcare has changed my life in more ways than I can count. It has introduced me to people whose resilience continues to inspire me, given me the opportunity to celebrate incredible recoveries, and allowed me to walk alongside people during some of the most vulnerable and difficult seasons of their lives. It has also given me a deep appreciation for the knowledge, skill, and compassion healthcare professionals bring to their work every day.

After years of working in hospitals, rehabilitation settings, and wellness-based private practices, I’ve noticed something that has stayed with me. People can leave healthcare knowing exactly what they’re supposed to do next and still have a lot of questions about what is actually happening to them. They know what medication to take, when the next appointment is, which exercises to do, or what recommendations to follow, but they may still be wondering why their body feels the way it does, how this happened in the first place, or what all of it means for their everyday life.

Sometimes there is a clear answer. Other times, the human body is not quite that black and white. Either way, I’ve come to believe that helping someone make sense of what they’re experiencing is an important part of helping them care for their health. It gives people a way to participate in the decisions being made about their bodies rather than simply moving from one recommendation to the next.

I think part of this matters so much to me because health doesn’t happen inside appointments. Appointments can absolutely support our health, but life is where we experience it. It shows up when you bend down to pick up your grandchild without thinking twice, when you feel confident taking a trip, when you go for your usual walk, or when you simply get through an ordinary Tuesday without having to plan your entire day around how your body feels. Healthcare ultimately exists to support the life happening outside of it.

That is also one of the reasons occupational therapy has always made so much sense to me. At its core, occupational therapy asks a deceptively simple question:

What do you need and want to do, and what is getting in the way?
That question can change the entire conversation. A diagnosis still matters. So do imaging, medications, procedures, rehabilitation, and the expertise of the healthcare professionals involved. But we also have to consider the person who is going home with all of that information and figuring out what it means when they need to get dressed, go to work, care for their family, exercise, make dinner, or get back to something they haven’t been able to do for a while.

Throughout my career, I’ve met plenty of people who have done everything they were told to do. They’ve seen specialists, completed therapy, had imaging, taken medications, and faithfully done their home exercise programs. Some recovered exactly as expected. Others improved but still felt like something was missing, and some weren’t dealing with a major problem at all. They simply wanted guidance before a small change became something that interfered more with their life.

What I kept noticing was how hard people often had to work to figure out what applied to them. There certainly isn’t a shortage of health information. If anything, we have the opposite problem. We can search a symptom and have hundreds of answers within seconds, hear completely different advice from three people online, and find someone willing to sell us a solution before we’ve even figured out what question we should be asking.

More information isn’t always what people need. Sometimes they need help sorting through what they already know, figuring out what matters, asking better questions, and deciding what makes sense for their body, their goals, and their life.

I started thinking a lot about the space between those two experiences. On one side is traditional healthcare, with incredible tools, expertise, and treatments that we absolutely need. On the other is an enormous wellness industry offering advice, products, programs, and promises, some helpful and some much harder to evaluate. A lot of people seem to find themselves somewhere in the middle, grateful for the healthcare they’ve received but still trying to figure out what to do with all of the information once they get home.

I kept coming back to the same question: Does it really have to be one or the other?

What would it look like to create a place where evidence, education, movement, and the realities of everyday life could exist in the same conversation? Where we could address a problem when something was wrong, but also talk about prevention, maintaining function, and what someone wants their health to allow them to keep doing five, ten, or twenty years from now? That question eventually became Attune.

I created Attune because I believe there is room for a healthcare experience that gives people more space to ask questions, pay attention to their bodies, and make informed decisions that actually fit their lives. I want prevention to receive attention before a crisis rather than only after one, and education to be part of care rather than something squeezed into the last few minutes of an appointment.

I also want us to think more broadly about what progress can look like. Sometimes it is less pain, better strength, or improved range of motion. Sometimes it is being able to walk through the airport without worrying about whether your body can handle the trip, getting back on the floor with your kids, returning to the garden, or realizing you went through an entire day without thinking about the thing that used to take up so much of your attention. Those things matter too.

That is the kind of healthcare I wish more people experienced: healthcare where clinical expertise and everyday life are part of the same conversation, where people have enough information to participate in decisions about their health, and where the goal is not simply to get through the problem in front of us but to support the life someone wants to keep living.

If this way of thinking about health resonates with you, that’s what I’ll continue exploring here at Attune. Through the Attune newsletter and Library, I’ll share evidence-informed perspectives on movement, pain, prevention, rehabilitation, healthy aging, and the everyday experiences that can tell us quite a bit about how we’re doing.

My hope is that you leave with something useful: a question you hadn’t thought to ask, a different way of looking at something you’ve been experiencing, or an idea you can actually use in your own life. Because ultimately, the point of healthcare isn’t to spend more of our lives thinking about healthcare. It’s to help us keep doing the things that make our lives ours!

Keep exploring with Attune

Attune shares articles and resources that look at health through the body, movement, everyday life, and the many factors that influence how we feel and function.

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