Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr Caitlin Keller, PT DPT.
Hi Dr Keller, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’ve always known I wanted to work with kids. So when I graduated in 2014, I started as a physical therapist in a small outpatient pediatric clinic. A year after that, I had transitioned to Houston’s large children’s hospital and was given an opportunity to help the pediatric pelvic health program grow; I had initially wanted to be involved in the women’s health program, but it was oversaturated with providers. I took the opportunity to mesh my love of pediatrics and pelvic health, and it was a PERFECT fit! I grew my specialty knowledge around the subject, and I grew the program and my passion for what I was doing for the next 6 years; I absolutely loved what I was doing. In 2020 I was on maternity leave, and through a few changing factors in our life, I ended up leaving my job at the hospital and started Unconstipated Kids! I took my first patient in November 2020, was a mobile therapist traveling to patients’ homes for less than a year before demand grew so much that I opened an office location July 2021. I have since transitioned into a larger space with a few other like-minded therapists. I LOVE serving the families I help, and I absolutely love what I do. The gratitude I feel for my journey and where I am now is tremendous, and I’m excited to see how Unconstipated Kids and my life continues to grow!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The biggest challenge with what I do is accommodating the need for my services. Not many providers out in the world serve families with children with bowel and bladder dysfunction from my perspective and approach, so once a family with those challenges hears about me, they are eager to seek out help. I am one person running a small business, but I receive inquiries from across the nation and a few international ones as well. I’d love to bring on additional help so I can keep up with the volume of families needing help, but the struggle remains in finding providers who want to do what I do or to learn how to do it.
As you know, we’re big fans of Unconstipated Kids. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Unconstipated Kids provides various types of services to families with children who are struggling with bowel or bladder challenges. Children being challenged by constipation, bedwetting, urinary leaks, incomplete toilet training, rectal prolapse, a history of Hirschsprung’s Disease, anal atresia, or other more complex medical histories can all benefit from our services. The approach that we take is unique in that it is comprehensive and acknowledges the child as a whole person. Our ideology is that there are a number of different contributing factors that can help or challenge a child’s bowel and bladder health, and the best method to help a child achieve improved toileting health is by acknowledging ALL of those contributing factors! One of the biggest strengths of Unconstipated Kids is to approach care by using small, achievable goals, helping the child to feel empowered during the process, and to give the family hope as well as easy-to-implement action steps.
The services that we offer provide a range of different levels of support. There is a free 25-minute mini-course on our online course platform, which might be the best place for a new family to start; it speaks about the different things a child might be challenged by, why you might want to seek out additional help, and why some symptoms that are typically seen as “common” are really an indication that something deeper needs help. Our YouTube channel, blog, website, and Instagram account are great ways to get some baseline information, or starting with some individually applied techniques. We then offer paid services to offer an increased amount of support. Unconstipated Kids offers virtual family coaching services to help guide a family to then guide their child through some action steps that will help based on what they’ve attempted. We then offer a range of in-person services for physical therapy services to address the child from the perspective of a physical therapist, looking at their movement patterns, asymmetries, and other neuromuscular components that could be affecting bowel and bladder health, as well as actually working on toileting mechanics themselves. If a family isn’t local to Houston, Texas, then we do offer 3-day therapy intensives where a family can travel to Houston, and receive three days of in-person therapy to get the most out of their time with us locally.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Starting my own business has been extraordinarily fun. I love being a student, so entering into the entrepreneurial world has been invigorating. From the beginning, I jumped full in, for good and for bad. I wish starting out, I had acknowledged the need for boundaries for work/life balance – but then again, that is something I’ve always struggled with. I seem to teeter one extreme to the other, and finding a true balance and maintaining that balance has been something I’ve always had to be extremely purposeful about. Something that has helped me has been finding other small business owners, being open and vulnerable about the struggles within business ownership, and working through problem-solving with the amazing group I’ve found.
Pricing:
- Virtual Family Coaching: $245/60-minute initial session
- Virtual Family Coaching: $155/30-minute follow-up
- Three-day Therapy Intensive: $1195
- Physical Therapy Evaluation: $595/2 hours
- SOS Toileting Course: $97
Contact Info:
- Website: https://unconstipatedkids.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unconstipatedkids/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UnconstipatedKids
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/UnconstipatedKids
- Other: https://linktr.ee/unconstipatedkids
Image Credits
Branding photos by Lifetime of Clicks. (Kelly Richman). https://lifetimeofclicksphotography.com/
