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Kim's interest in invisible illness began with her son. His POTS diagnosis as a teenager took the family somewhere clear guidance was hard to find, so Kim went looking for it — in the literature, and in her own community health caseload, where many people presented with hypermobility, fibromyalgia, ME/CFS or autonomic symptoms. Kim has since taught GPs, nurses and allied health teams how to assess and manage these presentations, and that work brought her to biio.
More than thirty years of physiotherapy in Melbourne and New York sit behind it. People often arrive having been told everything looks normal. Kim's interest is in the pattern underneath, and in what can be changed.
In hypermobile bodies, joints travel further than the system can control. Muscles take on stabilising work they were not built for, so ordinary movement costs more and shows up as fatigue, pain and joint irritability. Generic strengthening adds load before control, and symptoms climb. Kim works first on how movement is organised — position sense, timing, quality of control — so strength is built on something stable.
In POTS and related autonomic conditions, the body struggles to regulate heart rate and blood pressure against gravity. Being upright or exerting provokes symptoms that look like deconditioning but are not. Standard exercise prescription progresses too fast and causes setbacks. Kim works within current tolerance, often starting horizontal, and adjusts by the body's response rather than a timeline.
Post-exertional malaise means effort can be paid for days afterwards, which inverts the usual rules of rehabilitation: activity that helps most conditions worsens this one. Kim's work here is pacing before progression — mapping where energy goes, finding the thresholds that trigger a crash, and adding capacity only where the system can hold it.
Altered breathing is common in these conditions — upper chest breathing, air hunger, unconscious breath-holding — and it feeds back into dizziness, chest tightness and fatigue. It is easily attributed to anxiety and left there. Kim is trained in the Bradcliff Breathing method and assesses breathing as a movement pattern, retraining the mechanics so it stops adding to symptom load.
In fibromyalgia and other sensitised pain states, the nervous system amplifies signals that would otherwise pass unnoticed, so pain spreads, lingers, and stops tracking tissue damage. Treatment aimed only at the sore area tends to stall. Kim's postgraduate manipulative therapy training and her doctoral work in movement science meet here — hands-on treatment to change how a region moves and feels, paired with exercise dosed to what the system will accept.