As a child, Susan Rosenblatt-Schehr knew that she wanted to dedicate her life to helping people, possibly as a doctor. A few years later, at the age of 13, she refined her career goals.
"I volunteered at a nursing home at the age of 13 through the age of 18, and I just fell in love with the facility that they had for physical therapy," said Rosenblatt-Schehr. "This seemed to encompass everything I really wanted to do, so I tied the knot at 18 and went into school for it."
While Rosenblatt-Schehr has known for years that she wanted to help people, she is a little surprised even now, with 20 years of experience as a physical therapist under her belt, about how she ended up helping people.

Rosenblatt-Schehr claims to make people look younger.

Tension relief.
The owner of her own practice in Baltimore County's Essex community called Refacée, she uses her hands-on physical therapy skills to reduce the signs of aging, such as wrinkles and lines.
Using massage-like physical therapy techniques with patients with jaw problems, headaches and neck problems, Rosenblatt-Schehr "noticed that besides them feeling a lot better, they were also looking a lot better," she said. "My patients and I both discovered the reason was because the tension in the face, which caused a lot of their wrinkles and lines, [was] being diminished."
The patients were "thrilled," she said. "I was thinking more along the lines,
'There is something to this."

In 1999, Rosenblatt-Schehr added the Refacée clinic to her more traditional physical therapy practice, financing the expansion herself.

"I work from a postural standpoint," she said. "The person who is older and straighter looking definitely looks younger. I am making this approach through the mechanical release of the muscles, and relaxing them so that ... the brain understands where the ... tension and the length of the muscles should be."

Unlike the temporary effects of massage, "with this I am actually neuromuscularly re-training the brain, saying, 'No, this is where [the muscle] is supposed to be,"' she said.
After she ran a study of patients between the ages of 50 and 70, Rosenblatt - Schehr said she found positive effects of the treatment, and began to market it last year, advertising in two local magazines.
The treatments usually take 10 to 15 sessions at $90 to $100 per session, she said. Refacée currently has about 50 or 60 clients, for both initial and maintenance treatments.
Refacée also employs two therapists trained by Rosenblatt-Schehr to administer the treatments.
Rosenblatt-Schehr said she has never heard of another technique like her own being used for cosmetic purposes, and several physical therapy experts agreed.
"I have not seen any research on it," said Dr. Jennifer M. Bottomley, president of the geriatrics division of the American Physical Therapy Association. "She's not written it up for critical review by any professionals."

Typically, Bottomley said, "wrinkling in skin is not based in musculature as much as it is in moisture, exposure to the elements, thinks like nutrition [and] smoking.
She added that Rosenblatt-Schehr's method has similarities to a technique called Craniosacral therapy.

Dr. Roy Bechtel, an assistant professor of physical therapy at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, described the theory behind Craniosacral therapy.
"It was developed by osteopaths in the 1940s," he said. "They ... devised an entire theory of the motion of [the] skull bones related to the movement of spinal fluid - this rhythm you could feel all over your body. There is some question as to whether this rhythm is real or if it's an imaginary thing."

The improvements in posture brought about by techniques like craniosacral therapy could make patients appear younger, both therapists said.

"The techniques [Rosenblatt-Schehr] is talking about apply to postural muscles," said Bottorriley. "What's going to keep [people] young is the posture itself and also that they're able to move around" better.

Bechtel said that what Rosenblatt-Schehr does with her patients could quite probably cause the results she claims.

"You can make changes in the skin because of the underlying musculature," he said. "The influence of touching the skin and the pressure that the practitioner applies probably has a bigger affect than this [Craniosacral] rhythm."

Rosenblatt-Schehr said that while her technique may possess some qualities of Craniosacral therapy, she would not use that term to describe it.

"These are established physical therapy techniques," she said. "It's how they are put together to produce the results" that makes the Refacée method unique.
Rosenblatt-Schehr said she is currently seeking a patent for the Refacée method and is also looking to attract more young clients for preventive treatments.