Practice Stories
Physiotherapist, Adelaide · aged care & NDIS
A physiotherapist who lost three houses before he ever set foot in physio school explains why the number he cares about most isn't age — it's time.
Scott Frankham didn't plan a life in healthcare. "I also ended up in healthcare by accident," he says, and he means it literally — his path ran through Warhammer figurines, a job managing a Games Workshop store, and "lots of Hungry Jack's, lots of burgers, lots of junk food" that put 116 kilos on his frame. The turn started small and ordinary: he hurt his back brushing his teeth one morning. A chiropractor tried to sell him a package of sessions, which he didn't want, but did hand him a set of exercises, which worked. That led him to a personal trainer, who inspired him to become one himself. "I want to be a personal trainer," he remembers thinking. He lost the weight, got certified, and started coaching others.
Then came the accident that changed everything. His father had befriended the owner of a small aged care agency; the owner got sick, and Scott bought the business — two folders of clients and a filing cabinet. He computerized it, put his mother on the phones with one instruction — "if people need help, you got to help them every time, 100% of the time" — and the business grew fast. Too fast for the bookkeeping behind it. Nobody understood the tax obligations building up underneath the growth. "He didn't know what GST he was, so I had this massive tax debt," Scott says. "And then ended up going bankrupt, lost three houses, lost all my cars, started from scratch."
He doesn't tell this part of the story as a low point to be minimized. He tells it as the hinge his whole career turned on. Rebuilding meant going back to study — first a general health science degree that "doesn't get you a job or anything like that," then a transfer into physiotherapy once his grades qualified him. He weighed keeping his small hobby shop, his post-bankruptcy income source, against finishing the degree, and he chose the degree. "I just pulled the pin on the shop and went all in on physio." He graduated in 2020, straight into COVID-era aged care, masked all day in a facility that — unlike some in his state — never had a major outbreak. He's worked in aged care and NDIS disability support ever since. His oldest client is 101 — "and still going," he adds, like it's the whole point.
Outside the clinic, Scott runs a still-scrappy martial arts club out of a church hall he sets up and packs down every session himself — karate, judo, BJJ, kickboxing. He's watched hundreds of people walk through the door and a much smaller number stay long enough to be changed by it. "There's not many other ways of getting that kind of resilience," he says of what separates the ones who stick around. He's undiagnosed ADHD himself, and it shapes how he coaches — especially the neurodiverse kids drawn to his classes, some low-toned, some struggling with balance, some just needing a place built for a body that doesn't move like everyone else's. He builds his sessions around exactly that: strength, balance, endurance, and the quieter kind of resilience underneath all three.
Scott treats AI the way he treats most things — plainly, without ceremony. "I use chat... just once for like everything. It's like a personal assistant," he says. Before a second session with a complicated patient, he'll describe the case to it and see what comes back, sometimes a differential he hadn't considered. But he's clear that the tool doesn't finish the job. "You have to be able to slice through and find the stuff that's useful and legitimate and that has evidence-based," he says, "and then you can go and you can start to explore that, and then you can apply that in your physio treatment and plan with someone." The judgment call — what's real, what's worth trying, what's right for this particular 101-year-old or this particular teenager — stays with him.
What he hasn't fully resolved is a smaller argument he has with himself, mid-conversation, about what all of this time-saving is actually for. He starts to agree that AI should free clinicians to do what they do best — then stops and corrects himself in real time. "It should be to give people time to do what they want to do," he says, "because... of all the resources that we possess, time is the only one that we have no idea how much we have left." He doesn't resolve which version is right. He just leaves it sitting there, unfinished, the way most of the truest things in his story have been.
Watch the conversation to hear the rest of the bankruptcy story, the judo match that reinjured his shoulder, and what he tells every new client about the body he still doesn't claim to have fully figured out.