Physical Therapy in Des Moines, IA
If you’re in Des Moines and looking for physical therapy, here’s something worth knowing up front: most insurance plans in Iowa don’t require a physician referral before you can start PT. You can call us directly and get on the schedule without waiting on a referral to clear first — that alone often saves patients one to two weeks compared to going through a primary care visit first.
Who You’ll Work With
Our physical therapy program is led by Kelly Brown Gross, PT, MPT, WCS — a physical therapist with nearly two decades of clinical experience and a Women’s Health Certified Specialist (WCS) credential. That certification is genuinely uncommon; it’s a board-level specialty recognized by the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties, and relatively few PTs in the Des Moines metro hold it. If you’re dealing with pelvic floor dysfunction, pelvic pain, or postpartum-related issues, that’s a meaningfully different level of training than general orthopedic PT.
What Sets Our Approach Apart
A lot of physical therapy runs on standardized protocols — you get handed a sheet of exercises based on your diagnosis code, not your actual movement pattern. Kelly’s approach starts with a thorough evaluation: how you move, where you’re compensating, and what’s actually driving the pain, not just where you feel it. That distinction matters most with conditions like SI joint dysfunction, where the symptom location and the mechanical cause are often two different places.
Conditions We Commonly Treat
- SI joint pain and low back pain — our highest-volume condition across the clinic; in our own tracked outcomes, patients with sacroiliac joint dysfunction improved 84% on average
- Pelvic floor dysfunction and pelvic pain — Kelly’s specialty area, covering postpartum recovery, pelvic pain, and related dysfunction
- Post-surgical rehabilitation — structured progression after orthopedic procedures
- Sports injuries, including IT band pain — return-to-activity programming built around your sport, not a generic timeline
What to Expect
Your first visit is an evaluation, not a cookie-cutter exercise handout. Kelly assesses movement patterns, strength, and mobility to identify what’s actually driving your symptoms before building a treatment plan. For many patients, physical therapy works alongside chiropractic care or massage therapy here — if your evaluation points to a combined approach, we coordinate that internally rather than sending you somewhere else to figure it out.
Getting Here From Des Moines
We’re located at 5504 Ashworth Rd, a short drive from most of Des Moines — typically 10–15 minutes depending on where in the city you’re starting from.
Services
What We Actually Treat
Regardless of which community you’re coming from, our approach doesn’t change: chiropractic care, physical therapy, acupuncture, and massage therapy, coordinated together rather than delivered in isolation. We treat the full range of conditions covered on our Injuries & Treatment page — from back and neck pain to sports injuries to pelvic floor health — no matter where in the metro you’re driving in from.
Coordinated Care, Under One Roof
Chiropractic care, physical therapy, acupuncture, massage, shockwave therapy, and functional medicine are coordinated under one roof, so a patient who needs more than one discipline is not left to manage care between separate offices. Each provider works from the same diagnosis, in the right sequence, toward the same goal: getting you better.