Under one roof: Gunbarrel's Colorado Therapies & Aquatic Center takes a co-op approach to medical care
Johann Vogt, 3, plays hopscotch with his Occupational Therapist Joanne Gesualdi Graham Thursday at the Colorado Therapies and Aquatic Center. Vogt has two-way headphones on that play music to help him adjust to hearing multiple sounds at once.
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Dr. Shelese Pratt performs a check-up on a patient at the Colorado Therapies & Aquatic Center. The center offers various types of therapies, including acupuncture, physical and occupational therapy, and naturopathic medicine.
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Dawn Larson, left, and Joanne Gesualdi Graham, co-owners of Colorado Therapies & Aquatic Center, pose in the center. Annie Brook also shares ownership of the business.
Dawn Larson began her therapeutic tutelage at her father's elbow when she was just a little girl.
"People are too speedy to notice if I get a haircut, but Carmel House residents notice every time," Jim Graves told his daughter.
Graves ran Boulder's now-defunct Carmel House, a home for developmentally delayed adults for more than 20 years. He taught his daughter that what so many people perceive as weakness was so much more.
Larson, a fourth-generation Boulder native and a psychotherapist, took the lessons her father gave her to a new level. Looking at the challenges everyone faces at multiple levels in their lives, the Gunbarrel medical center she helped to found seeks to heal more than life's frantic pace.
Colorado Therapies & Aquatic Center, which opened about a year ago, is based on the idea of attachment.
"Most people's core wound boils down to a primary abandonment," Larson says, adding that repairing that sense of abandonment is teaching people to find terra firma in the most vulnerable of places. "Once a person can stand in that place, they will find themselves glued into the rest of their life like never before."
Larson and her two partners, Joanne Gesualdi Graham and Annie Brook, wanted to have a space where a variety of healing practitioners could come together under one roof. Allowing a person to truly trust the world at that core place again is different for every unique individual, the partners concluded. For some, massage and healing touch helps to move the psychotherapeutic work along. For others, the battle begins in the body through health and nutrition.
Colorado Therapies & Aquatic Center is a place where a multitude of healing arts professionals come to offer an a la carte approach to services rendered. The model follows loosely that of a business co-op with independent healing practitioners benefiting from a shared space.
Instead of running across town to gather speech services, occupational and physical therapy in three different locations, parents in need of those services for their children can find them under one roof and take care of several medical needs simultaneously. While children are at their speech appointments, for example, mothers can take advantage of parenting or behavioral classes or simply get much-needed massages.
Finding a physical space that worked was not easy. In fact, Larson had all but given up.
The partnership was put on hold and she was preparing to move forward alone when she met local real-estate developer Bill Lanning. Lanning built approximately 150 homes and several businesses in the neighborhood just north of the King Soopers in Gunbarrel.
The building that Larson settled on at 5412 Idylwild Trail was not for sale when she viewed it. She was merely looking to rent.
But when Lanning heard Larson's vision, he was especially drawn in by her desire to help families with special-needs kids.
"I have a number of friends who have children with special needs and I've watched them struggle," Lanning said.
Lanning sold Larson and her partners the building at a price considerably below the market value.
"What impressed me is their service to humanity," Lanning says. "It had special meaning for me. I put the need and service they're providing ahead of financial gain for myself."
In order to create that kind of healing environment, the owners spent many long hours tending to the details of transforming a business park into a womb of nurturance.
"We changed every light fixture in the building" says Larson, who knew light would make a huge difference in the way people felt, and, consequently, the speed with which they could progress. "We had to do a lot with sound-proofing as well, because a lot of our practitioners use sound in their therapies."
The dream was to bring together a variety of practitioners under one roof, let them cross-refer patients to one another and learn from one another.
"Something happens in the informal relationships in the hall, the two- and three-minute exchanges of perspective," says Brook, one of the co-owners. "There is insight, a better overall sense of the entire case."
Collected at Colorado Therapies & Aquatic Center are specialists in psychotherapy, acupuncture, yoga, nutritional counseling, massage and behavioral, speech, occupational and physical therapies.
The group has monthly meetings where two practitioners are featured and demonstrate/teach something unique about their practice. Together, the group has learned about techniques as varied as sensory integration identification, brain integration therapy and attachment disorders and their affect on behaviors.
The purpose of the monthly teaching meetings is not to make each therapist an expert on the chosen topic, but to help them identify red flags that would merit a cross referral to one of their colleagues.
"Cross referrals here are abundant," says receptionist and massage therapist Amy Banks.
With a naturopathic physician on board, Collected at Colorado Therapies & Aquatic Center is able to offer services to families that set the standard in alternative care.
"I don't treat disease, I treat individuals," Dr. Shelese Pratt says. "For example, Autistic children typically have sensitive gastrointestinal systems. Often dairy and wheat are two of the culprits that could help ease that stress. Some changes are drastic, some less obvious."
