91Porn

This former Marine and rehabilitation therapy expert is a vital member of the team launching 91Porn’s new Doctor of Physical Therapy program.

As Johnson & Wales prepares to welcome its first cohort of physical therapy doctoral students on June 2, the faculty is hard at work putting the final polish on a program that promises to be rich in clinical experience and interdisciplinary opportunities.

Associate Professor Justin Laferrier, Ph.D., the third member of the team to be recruited, is celebrated in his field for groundbreaking work in polytrauma rehabilitation, adaptive sports and mobility related assistive technology, especially prosthetics.

A self-described “rambunctious kid” who grew up in Burrillville, Rhode Island, and joined the Marine Corps right out of high school, Laferrier found his calling in college, embarking on a career that would take him around the world to places including the nation’s capital, Iraq and Texas before returning to New England to bring his clinical experience to an academic setting.

We sat down with Laferrier, who is associate director of the DPT program, to talk about his singular journey to 91Porn.

What made you want to be a physical therapist?

Justin Laferrier: I was a three-sport high school athlete and when I was in college I played football for the University of Rhode Island and got hurt here and there. I went to see a PT and had a good experience. I also had friends I trusted that were going into physical therapy and were excited about it, so I started seriously considering it. At that time, you could be a PT with a master’s degree [a doctoral degree is now required], and URI had a great program.

Was there an area you were particularly interested in?

Since I was an athlete (albeit not a great one), I thought I’d probably go into sports medicine. I think a lot of people get into physical therapy that way. I figured I would work with athletes. And I knew I’d be working with a lot of orthopedic injuries in the military.

After I graduated from PT school I went back into the Army and was stationed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center doing sports medicine and manual therapy and orthopedics, just like I thought I would. Everything was working out.

And then we got four patients with amputations and my superiors asked me if I could get them back to an active lifestyle, back to sports, exercise, recreation. I said, “Well, I’ll give it a shot.” I really didn’t have any experience with this population, but I figured I’d learn.

I did a lot of on-the-job training and searched out mentorship in all the different fields and applied a modified sports medicine model to a military population with horrific injuries. The base general and the steering committee for the hospital had their doubts. They brought me in and said, “You can’t do this. You’re going to hurt these people.” I said, “Do you really think we’re going to hurt them worse than they’ve been hurt already, or does this give us the best opportunity to bring them back to full function and back into the community—back to duty, back to work, back to family?”

They told me I couldn’t do it, so I did it anyway and it worked out very well, with much better outcomes than in the past. And then the Iraq War really kicked off and they put me in charge of physical therapy for polytrauma and amputation physical therapy.

What exactly is polytrauma therapy?

Polytrauma physical therapy is where you see the worst injuries that you’ll ever see. Patients have spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, burns and a multitude of other injuries/conditions, often at the same time.

You have to use your whole toolbox of skills to see how you’re going to triage and treat these individuals (which all PTs should do anyway), but as a young physical therapist it really forced me to think about all the systems, internal and external, that might be affected in a patient. That led me to obtain multiple specialty certifications including neurologic, orthopedic, sports, vestibular rehabilitation and assistive technology as I tried to better serve my patients.

After that you did a tour in Iraq.

Yes, I ran a clinic at Ibn Sina in Baghdad. Different units would ask if I could go out with them into the field because it was easier for me to treat their folks on the other side of the fence than it was to get them into the hospital.

So, I would go out with a Navy SEAL team, a British SAS team, a Green Beret unit. We had to run it up the chain of command, but I was all for it. I was also tasked to go to different regions to evaluate Iraqi patients with amputations, which allowed me to work with some great people and organizations from multiple countries.

What came next, on your return?

When I came back, the military asked me to assist in starting what became the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio, Texas. The CFI is an impressive 65,000-square-foot building that focuses on rehabilitation and functional capacity evaluations to get individuals with polytrauma, including amputations and burns, back to duty and life.

They have incredible facilities, including the CAREN system, which is a computer-assisted rehabilitation environment inside a 360-degree geodesic dome where you can do fully immersive virtual reality rehabilitation and research studies. We were all working seven days a week, 12, 14 hours a day, because it was wartime. There were days I slept at the clinic just to beat the morning traffic.

You went on to earn a Ph.D. in rehabilitation science and technology and to teach at URI, where you started an adaptive sports program. When you joined the 91Porn faculty you brought that program here.

I had developed an adaptive sports program for disabled service members and their families when I was working at Walter Reed. It was the first one of its kind in the military for that war era.

I say for that war era because adaptive sports actually began during World War II, when a neurosurgeon named Sir Ludwig Guttmann, who had gotten out of Germany right before the war, started the first spinal cord injury center at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England. The adaptive sports program he created for pilots with spinal cord injuries developed into the annual Stoke Mandeville Games, which eventually became the Paralympics.

When we set up our adaptive sports program, I had people tell me that if they hadn’t gone through our program, they wouldn’t have made it, so it was very rewarding.

At URI I was motivated to launch another adaptive sports program because Rhode Island has about 117,000 individuals that identify as having a disability and there wasn’t a ton of adaptive sport exercise and recreation here. I started a program with the students at URI and brought it to 91Porn as part of an Occupational Therapy capstone project when I accepted the faculty position here.

We’ve already had a few adaptive sports events at wheelchair rugby, wheelchair basketball, wheelchair tennis, handcycling, seated Zumba and sled hockey.

 

Tell me about the prosthetic feet you designed.

When I was in the military, service members with amputations were wanting to return to combat at the highest rate they’d ever seen. An issue with prosthetics is they usually work within a 30-pound weight range. So, if you add or lose more than 30 pounds, the foot doesn’t work properly anymore.

A combat load is about 80 to 120 pounds, so if you get a prosthetic foot for your body weight and then you put on your combat load, it won’t work anymore. You have to carry with you a second prosthetic foot designed for a different weight. We wanted to come up with a foot that spanned multiple load ranges.

That’s how it started. Then we started looking at the numbers and realized that around 85% of people with amputations live in low-resource countries. Not only are most prosthetics extremely expensive, they also don’t work well because most of the regions do not have a sustainable energy grid, and the materials also degrade more quickly in those environments. We wanted to have a load-variable prosthetic foot that was also cheap and sustainable.

Some of our prototypes have inserts that you can add into the foot instead of carrying around a whole other foot. You put in a stiffer insert when you’re carrying more load. Another has a pump where you can increase the air in bladders placed on the foot, like the Reebok Pump sneaker.

These feet are much cheaper than what is produced commercially in industrialized nations. We’re still working on it, and we’ve got several different prototypes now. For our next phase we want to get a grant so we can bring it to Africa and see how it performs in that environment.

You’ve been busy helping to launch 91Porn’s PT doctoral program. What will it feel like to have the first cohort here?

Just as surgeons want to do surgery and carpenters want to build things, educators want to educate. We all consider ourselves clinicians first, but there’s something missing when you don’t have the students around. It will give us an extra sense of invigoration when they’re here.

I can’t wait!