By Logan Langlois
NASHVILLE, TN — Therapeutic Focus, the self-described “little clinic with a big heart,” has opened a new outpatient location in Crittenden County with a ribbon-cutting ceremony that welcomed several guests, including a speech from West Memphis Mayor Marco McClendon. Practice owner and operator LaTeasha Gaither-Davis said she has been practicing occupational therapy since 2008 and opened Therapeutic Focus in 2011, only recently deciding to open a practice around the same area she grew up in.
“I am ecstatic, I’m very, very excited,” Gaither-Davis said. “I’ve been in the West Memphis, Tennessee community since 2011. But it feels wonderful to have a building that’s actually my own that I can share with the children and community here.”
Gaither-Davis said that she never wanted to work for herself when she first began practicing occupational therapy, choosing to work in nursing homes, hospitals, mental health settings, sports clinics, and an outpatient pediatric clinic in both San Diego, California, and Laredo, Texas. She said while living in San Diego, she would periodically visit her home in Tennessee, where she would talk to residents who would tell her they needed quality orthopedic therapy.
“I thought to myself, ‘Why am I just praying for a solution, why don’t I help be that solution,’” Gaither-Davis said. “I was an 80s baby, the problem persisted back then.”
Gaither-Davis said the therapy she currently provides is pediatrics, and that quality care of which is in short supply in Tennessee. Gaither-Davis said she’s noticed the need for services such as speech therapy, for example, rise since the COVID-19 lockdowns for what she considered before to be unexpected reasons.
“Those mask mandates, I never thought it would be detrimental or impact children’s speech,” Gaither-Davis said. “When children are first born, they rely on looking at their parents’ mouths and faces to learn the social graces with smiling, feeling joy, feeling sadness in talking so that they can formulate those words to speak.”
Gaither-Davis said the process of acquiring the location was one with several ups and downs over a span of years. She said she purchased the location about four years ago, only for the pandemic to occur as soon as she had acquired a contractor and was prepared to build on the property. Construction would begin in 2021, only to take several years after to complete due to the resulting worldwide supply chain disruptions which have followed COVID.
Gaither-Davis said that she was exposed to private therapy at the age of three when she was treated for her speech delay. Unfortunately for Gaither-Davis’s family, there was not a facility that would provide services for her within a 35-mile radius of their small rural community. Because of this, she would have to travel to another county and state to receive the services that she needed, until her family found a recent speech therapy school graduate who provided free services.
While in the tenth grade, Gaither-Davis’s great-grandmother had a stroke and an aneurysm, after which medical staff told her family she would be left a vegetable. Gaither-Davis said with the help of her occupational physical therapist, her great-grandmother not only not become a vegetable but was able to cook and care for herself using only one hand.
“She was able to prove the statistics wrong,” Gaither-Davis said. “Just seeing her interactions with therapists. Me, with my personal encounter with me as a child, I realized this is what I want to do.”
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