CRISTINA SHUPE, PT — PHYSICAL THERAPIST
I’m Cristi, founder and owner of Calyx Physical Therapy. I established Calyx to create a welcoming, unhurried space where every patient receives the time, attention, and individualized support needed for true healing. I chose this profession to make meaningful, lasting improvements in people’s lives — and after nearly 30 years, I would choose it again. Hearing a patient say “I feel better” never grows old. I love what I do and consider it an honor to guide each person through their healing journey.
My thoughts on “health.”
My career has followed several distinct yet deeply connected paths. I began in a small outpatient clinic that was the area’s go‑to practice, where gifted colleagues exposed me to a wide variety of conditions and helped me develop a broad clinical skill set. That early experience became the foundation for everything that followed. During that time I earned a certification in Pilates for Rehabilitation, which planted the seed for a new direction: I opened my own clinic and began integrating Pilates‑based movement with manual therapy to treat chronic pain, neurological issues, and musculoskeletal conditions.
For the next decade I worked alongside Jerome M. Weiss, MD, specializing in abdominal and pelvic pain, urological conditions, and pelvic floor dysfunction. That chapter deepened my appreciation for the body as an integrated system. In a clinic devoted to pelvic pain, it became increasingly clear that many patients also experienced jaw tension, headaches, or foot dysfunction—not separate problems, but different expressions of the same underlying sources.
A turning point in my career came with the study of Fascial Counterstrain (FCS). Since my first course in 2013, learning that inflammation and fascial dysfunction likely underlie many disease states has completely reshaped how I think about the body, pain, and healing. I remain actively involved in advanced FCS training — driven by a genuine passion for the work, the rapidly advancing research in fascial science, and the ability to treat increasingly complex conditions with greater precision.
Calyx Physical Therapy is the expression of all of it — a practice built on nearly three decades of clinical experience, a deep commitment to ongoing learning, and an unwavering belief that the body, when treated as the integrated system it truly is, has a remarkable capacity to heal.