PT Alumnus Proud of Profession that Makes a Difference in People’s Lives

Laura Lee (Dolly) Swisher, PT, MDiv, PhD, FAPTA, was going into the ministry, working on a PhD in religious ethics at Vanderbilt University years ago, until she felt called to go in a different direction.

She remembered how her father took excellent care of her mother, who had multiple sclerosis. A forklift truck driver, he also had an artistic side, and later in life repaired violins and cellos. She worked with him then, and recalled how she loved the hands-on work.

An internship as a hospital chaplain before studying at Vanderbilt contributed to what she calls an “aha moment” that set her on a different career path. She decided she wanted to be a physical therapist, a field that combined caring for people, just like her father had done with her mother, and hands-on work to improve people’s lives. Already in Tennessee, she applied to the University of

Tennessee Health Science Center, was admitted, and graduated in 1986 as a physical therapist, a career she has loved for almost 40 years.

“Physical therapy is a wonderful profession in terms of being able to work closely with your patient, which you don’t get to do in all health care professions,” Dr. Swisher said.

Dr. Swisher, who lives in Prosper, Texas, is Professor Emerita and the former director of the School of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of South Florida (USF) in the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine.

She credits UTHSC with giving her an excellent education from instructors who cared about their students and the patients they would serve.

“I think that the faculty were just so caring about students,” she said. “They were very much oriented towards being a great practitioner, but at the same time building a foundation for you to be successful in your professional life.”

After graduating from UTHSC, she returned to Vanderbilt, working in outpatient physical therapy and became a certified hand therapist. An opportunity to teach at Tennessee State University came her way, and she eventually became the interim program director and head of the Department of Physical Therapy. Realizing she had some unfinished business to attend to, she earned a PhD in public administration at Tennessee State University and wrote her dissertation on ethics.

She joined USF in 1998 as an assistant professor, rising to become the director of the School of Physical Therapy & Rehabilitation Sciences in 2018.

Dr. Swisher said her education at UTHSC trained her not only to be a caring and good physical therapist, but a leader in advancing her profession.

Dr. Swisher served as the vice president of the Tennessee Physical Therapy Association and served as a member and chair of the American Physical Therapy Association’s Ethics and Judicial Committee, and the Commission on Accreditation. One of the things she is most proud of is serving as cochair of the task force to revise the code of ethics for physical therapists.

She has been on several editorial boards and is a Catherine Worthingham Fellow of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) and the recipient of the APTA Lucy Blair Service Award, the Polly Cerasoli Lectureship Award, and Mary McMillan Lecture Award, the most prestigious award given by the APTA.

Dr. Swisher is retired now, but she continues to contribute to research in her field. Decades after that aha moment, she is certain she followed the right path.

“We talk a lot in physical therapy about the significance of movement,” she said. “Well, you are empowering people to have more out of their lives. Physical therapy allows you to be involved in helping people to maximally enjoy their daily life, whether it’s in walking more, biking more, but also when you get down to the family things, they are some of the things that turn out to be most meaningful as a physical therapist. Can you help somebody walk down the aisle for a child’s wedding? Can you help someone to travel somewhere to see someone graduate? And are you able to help somebody get down on the floor maybe and play with their toddler?”