Beyond Limits: Unmasking Potential Through Movement Discovery

Beth E. Fisher, PT, PhD, FAPTA, is a physical therapist, educator, and scholar whose clinical career has been shaped by numerous observations and experiences of patients’ remarkable potential to recover ideal movement capability. Currently, Dr Fisher is a Professor of Clinical Physical Therapy in the Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at the University of Southern California. She is Director of the Neuroplasticity and Imaging Laboratory, primarily using transcranial magnetic stimulation to investigate brain-behavior relationships during motor skill learning and motor control in both individuals without disabilities and individuals with neurologic disorders. Dr Fisher previously worked at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center on the Adult Neurology and Brain Injury Services. During her years as a clinician and rehabilitation specialist, it was her greatest ambition to be a part of developing physical therapist interventions that would maximize neural and behavioral recovery in individuals with pathological conditions affecting the nervous system. Toward this goal, she has continued to consult and teach nationally and internationally on current concepts for the treatment of adults with neurological disorders. It has been her consistent clinical observation not only that patients are limited by impairments that result from their injury, but that movement abnormalities are in part the result of a patient’s automatic, implicit tendency to “respond” to those impairments via compensation.