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Shira Weiss

The PT Who Actually Listens: How Shira Weiss Built Nova Motion Physical Therapy Around the Patients Nobody Else Could Figure Out

Most of her patients have already seen five different providers by the time they find her. They’ve been dismissed, misdiagnosed, and told their pain isn’t a big deal. What happens next is the reason she opened her own practice.

There’s a particular kind of patient that walks into Nova Motion Physical Therapy. They’re not new to the healthcare system — they’ve been through it, repeatedly, often without getting real answers. Jaw pain that nobody could explain. Headaches that never fully resolved. Facial pain that one specialist after another chalked up to stress or told them to manage with medication. By the time they find Shira Weiss, most of them have already seen five different practitioners.

“A lot of people are medically gaslit,” she says plainly. “A lot of people are very afraid. They have pain in a region that nobody seems to be able to address.”

Shira is a doctor of physical therapy who has spent nearly two decades in outpatient orthopedics, treated Washington Capitals players in the training room, and ultimately built a practice around one of the most underserved patient populations in all of physical therapy: people living with TMJ dysfunction, orofacial pain, cervicogenic headaches, and related conditions that tend to fall through the cracks of conventional care. Nova Motion Physical Therapy, which she opened in August of 2023 in Northern Virginia, is built specifically around giving those patients the time, attention, and expertise they’ve been searching for.

A Career That Earned Its Focus

Shira’s path into physical therapy started early. A sports medicine class in high school introduced her to anatomy, and she found herself drawn to the field’s clarity — the fact that the body follows rules, that problems have causes, and that skilled hands can do something about it. She volunteered at a PT clinic, loved the pace and the social nature of the work, and never looked back.

She earned her degree in exercise and sports science at the University of Delaware, completed her doctorate in physical therapy at Washington University in St. Louis in 2005, and spent the following eighteen years in general outpatient orthopedics. Along the way, she fulfilled a personal dream: treating players for the Washington Capitals. Growing up a Capitals fan and eventually standing in the training room as the professional responsible for the athletes she’d watched on TV was, by her own account, genuinely surreal.

But it was a different kind of challenge — one she experienced herself — that ultimately redirected her career.

Shira had long dealt with TMJ issues and spent years looking for quality clinical education on how to treat the temporomandibular joint, because it’s a joint that receives surprisingly little attention in physical therapy training. When she finally found a course and learned that treating TMD was becoming a board specialty, something clicked. She wanted to do this work — and she wanted to do it right, with the kind of focused attention the patient population genuinely requires.

“In trying to find the perfect job where I could treat fewer patients and spend more time with them,” she says, “I realized I could just create that.”

What One-on-One Actually Means

The contrast between in-network physical therapy and what Shira offers at Nova Motion is stark, and she’s direct about describing it.

In a traditional in-network clinic, a therapist might see a patient for thirty minutes — which in practice means considerably less hands-on time once you account for a late arrival, a long intake story, paperwork at the front desk. If that patient is emotional, dealing with a complicated history, or needs to talk through what they’re experiencing before treatment can even begin, the clock is working against everyone.

For Shira’s patient population, that model simply doesn’t work. Many of the people she sees are carrying years of chronic pain, anxiety about their symptoms, and a history of not being believed. The intake alone often takes significant time. The listening is not optional — it’s clinical.

“If a patient wants to come in and talk for 45 minutes and I only get to touch them for maybe 10 or 15 — if that is what they need in order to drive how I treat them — they are welcome to do that,” she says. “We have the time and space to allow that to happen.”

That philosophy extends to everything: the treatment plans, the goal setting, the patient education. When someone finally feels heard after years of being rushed through appointments or told their pain wasn’t significant, the therapeutic relationship shifts. And that shift, Shira has found, is often where the real progress begins.

The Joint Nobody Talks About

The temporomandibular joint — the hinge that connects the jaw to the skull — doesn’t get much spotlight in either physical therapy school or general medical practice. Most patients who come to Shira’s office didn’t know that a physical therapist could even treat jaw pain, let alone that a board specialty existed for it.

What makes TMJ dysfunction particularly tricky is how interconnected the symptoms can become. A click in the jaw might be benign on its own, but when it’s paired with pain in the cheek, difficulty opening or closing the mouth, or a sensation that the teeth no longer line up properly, it signals something that needs attention. More commonly, Shira sees patients with muscular symptoms running along the sides of the head, the temples, the cheeks, and into the neck — a pattern that often manifests as headaches and gets misattributed to migraines or tension that never fully resolves with conventional treatment.

The tools she uses are varied and precise. Hands-on muscle manipulation, both intraoral and extraoral. Dry needling — a technique using small filament needles to release tension directly in muscle tissue — which she finds particularly effective on the jaw, head, and neck muscles. Neuromuscular reeducation to help patients develop better awareness and control of their jaw, tongue, and neck positioning. Postural strengthening. And throughout all of it, patient education — because understanding why the pain exists is part of how people stop recreating it.

Common culprits she discusses with patients: sitting at a desk with a chin resting in a hand, biting nails, chewing gum throughout the day, sleeping with the head in a position that strains the neck. Small habits, accumulated over time, that quietly generate the exact symptoms these patients are trying to escape.

A Team Built Around Collaboration

Nova Motion currently has two therapists — Shira and a full-time colleague who specializes in pelvic floor physical therapy — and they frequently share patients. The overlap between jaw pain and pelvic floor dysfunction is more common than most people realize; both are connected to the nervous system, to breath work, to how the body manages tension and stress. The pelvic floor therapist also uses real-time ultrasound imaging — not for obstetric purposes, but to show patients the activation of their core muscles, providing biofeedback that helps people understand what their bodies are actually doing.

This summer, a third therapist joins the team — someone who holds the same certification as Shira. That certification, Certified Cervical and Temporomandibular Therapist, is held by only about 65 practitioners in the United States and Canada combined. Having two of them practicing in Northern Virginia is, by any measure, exceptional.

Shira also works closely with a TMJ surgeon, several orofacial pain specialists, and a broad network of dentists — many of whom didn’t know physical therapists with this specialty existed until she introduced herself. The goal is an integrated care model where each provider knows what the others are doing, communication is open, and the patient doesn’t fall through the gaps between disciplines.

When Everyday Life Comes Back

The moments Shira holds onto aren’t clinical milestones in the traditional sense. They’re the messages she gets from patients reporting back that they finally ate a steak without pain, gave a presentation without their jaw fatiguing, or were able to be intimate with a partner without their jaw locking.

“Those are really simple everyday things that most of the time we don’t think about,” she says. “But when something interferes with that, you think about it constantly.”

That’s the population she built her practice for — people whose quality of life has been quietly eroded by pain in one of the most active and social regions of the body, in ways that most of the healthcare system has been ill-equipped to address. When they get to the other side of that, it stays with her.

Nova Motion Physical Therapy accepts patients via its website, where they can book online or reach Monica, the patient care coordinator, to set up a discovery call. Shira and her team always take that step first — making sure the match is right, that the patient understands what to expect, and that they’re seeing the most appropriate provider for their specific situation.

For anyone who has been cycling through practitioners without finding relief, that call might be the first time they feel like someone actually has a plan.

Shira Weiss is a doctor of physical therapy and the founder of Nova Motion Physical Therapy in Northern Virginia, specializing in TMJ dysfunction, orofacial pain, cervicogenic headaches, neck pain, and women’s pelvic health. Find them at novamotionphysicaltherapy.com or on Instagram at @novamotionpt.

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