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Community Corner

Health Connection: Physical Therapy

Neighbors making a difference in our community's health and wellness.

Dr. Gwen D. Stamper has made physical therapy her life’s work. 

You could almost say that the physical therapy profession chose her. Always active and athletic, Stamper fondly recalls early years of biking, swimming, tennis, horseback riding, skiing, and skating while growing up near a lake in her native Ohio. She even took up running long before running was such a fashionable means of exercise.

“Back then there weren’t the distractions there are now,” Stamper said.

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Today’s young people are so distracted by video games, television, computers and internet, she said.

When it was time to select a college major, Stamper seriously considered exercise physiology because of her love of sports and exercise. However, the study of exercise physiology was very lab-oriented, and she was more interested in being active and working with people.

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“I realized that if I did physical therapy I would bring people into the equation,” Stamper said.

After graduating from Ohio State University in 1972, she began her career by working and teaching at a number of rehab hospitals and universities on the East Coast. Finally settling in the DC metropolitan area, she has been practicing here for over 30 years.   

In 2004, she received her doctorate from the University of Maryland and opened Stamper Health and Wellness on Main Street in the Kentlands.

“What I love about being a physical therapist is that it is very rewarding,” said Stamper, not only in helping people, but in that there is “immediate feedback and quick results.”

Stamper has varied and extensive experience in a number of areas including cardiac rehab, aquatic therapy (from children to the elderly), and hippotherapy (horseback therapy).

Music therapy may not yet be in her repertoire, but she is a musician by hobby and plays piano, ukulele, and flute.

At the end of the day, Stamper wants her patients to have a personal and enjoyable experience with physical therapy, her life’s work.  “Health care is becoming so de-personalized,” she said, “ and I am trying to keep that human component.”

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