Erin was diagnosed with minor 17° thoracic scoliosis at the age of 14.
Follow-up treatment was never sought after her initial visit as her doctor said her scoliosis would not progress.
Fast forward to age 21 when Erin danced with the Radio City Rockettes. She injured her knees during the season, leaving her in knee braces. The Rockettes’ head choreographer told her she would not dance a second year unless she fully recovered prior to the next season and recommended Pilates.
Intent on staying a Rockette, Erin started taking group Reformer classes in NYC and fell in love with Pilates. She decided to become a certified Pilates instructor while finishing her business degree in college, with a dream of using them together. During her Pilates teacher training, Erin worked on someone who had scoliosis and saw a vertebra realign for the first time due to an exercise. This is when she realized that Pilates could help scoliosis.
Erin moved to Nashville after graduating and opened her first Pilates studio without any focus on scoliosis. Word got out that she was a former Rockette and had scoliosis. People with scoliosis started seeing her in hopes that she could help them. Erin had no specific training in treating scoliosis at the time but had a large heart, a keen mind, and a passion to help others.
A set of parents brought their 9 year old daughter with scoliosis to Erin. She was able to reduce their daughter’s major curve by about 10° in the first six months. The parents said they would do anything for Erin to aid her in helping their daughter. Luckily, the parents worked at a prestigious university, and Erin told them she wanted research. They showed up at their daughter’s next lesson with a thumb drive packed full every available research article up to that point with the word “scoliosis” in it.
Erin spent the next decade reading every single research article from the hundreds included on the thumb drive covering a wide array of topics, including surgery, movement, bracing, the root of scoliosis, and psychological aspects involved with scoliosis. She read every book on the market, took trainings, and realized there was a giant gap missing in care for people with scoliosis. During workshops Erin attended, she noticed practitioners looked confused and those with scoli looked emotionally wounded. Erin had a hard time reconciling that treatment for scoliosis was often confusing and not helpful at its best and deeply traumatizing physically and emotionally at its worst. Was that the best the world could offer for scoliosis care? There had to be a better way to deal with both the physical and emotional aspects of living with scoli.
A year and a half after Erin opened her first studio in Nashville, she received a cold call from Al Harrison, head of education at world-renowned Balanced Body, the largest Pilates company in the world. He told Erin Balanced Body was launching a teacher training program and asked her to be a teacher for them, the first in not only Tennessee but in the southeast United States.
During her decade of reading research, Erin sold her first Pilates studio, gave birth to two sons, taught scoli clients at her house, and decided to write a small book about her experience of working with people with scoliosis. She figured she should put her X-ray in that book. When she requested her original X-ray, she was told that her doctor had discarded it. She had to get a new X-ray if she wanted one in her book.
Lo and behold, Erin was shocked when her thoracic curve measured 35° and had gained a 25° lumbar curve. Her doctor told her that her back would not progress! He was terribly wrong. Erin realized how broken the medical scoliosis system was when it came to treating scoliosis. If she wanted to help herself, she had to figure it out. Erin spent the next years practicing what she taught, combining what she’d studied in research and her Pilates knowledge. She reduced her upper curve to the 20° range and lower curve to be less than 10°.
While being a stay-at-home-mom and part-time Pilates instructor, Erin started developing resources for people with scoli during her small moments of downtime. She published two books and had an app created to help track scoli without the need for x-rays.
One of Erin’s home-studio clients asked to hear scoli client stories. The client’s jaw dropped and told Erin that she needed to go big with this because what Erin was doing was miraculous. Erin told her client that the hill was too big to climb, going against what the medical world taught, and gave her client homework to research “scoliosis” online. Her client came back the next lesson and said she looked up “scoliosis” on a popular doctor talk show online and “sclerosis” showed up. She did more digging and realized “scoliosis” was the number one pediatric spinal diagnosis in the world, and no one covered it. There was no information on it, let alone how to help all the people who had it. She told Erin to do something about this because she had the knowledge.
After Erin called scoliosis a spiral spine during a lesson, the same client told her to call her company Spiral Spine.
Eventually, her youngest son went off to kindergarten and she told her husband she didn’t know what her next step was. He said he knew, and it was time for her to open another brick-and-mortar Pilates studio. Erin stubbornly resisted and said no way, saying Jesus was going to have to miraculously open all the doors because she wasn’t doing it on her own. Well, a location opened up at a very affordable rate four minutes from their house. Spiral Spine Pilates miraculously opened six weeks later.
Upon opening Spiral Spine Pilates, Erin began to teach for Balanced Body’s Teacher Training Program again. She started to teach her own workshops focusing on helping those with scoliosis at Spiral Spine as well as those for Balanced Body around the world.
Being surrounded by those learning to become Pilates instructors and those with scoliosis gave Erin a unique view of how to educate both movement practitioners wishing to help those with scoliosis and those diagnosed with scoliosis. Workshops at Spiral Spine were developed to allow movement practitioners access to those with scoliosis in order to gain hands-on knowledge from those with scoliosis while giving those with scoliosis the tools they need to thrive throughout their daily lives.
This is how Erin trains the Spiral Spine staff to be top-notch instructors that work with a wide array of people. Spiral’s staff works with clients of all ages and stages of scoli: from young children who have been recently diagnosed to grandparents trying to stay ahead of their grandchildren, from those without a brace to those with a brace, from those who haven’t had surgery to those who have had a spinal fusion or tethering, from those without pain to those in chronic pain, from those who are neurotypical to those who are neurodivergent. Spiral Spine has become world-renowned for figuring out how to work with extremely difficult bodily situations.
With another two groundbreaking books on scoliosis being published and subsequently translated by medical companies into both Chinese and Korean, Spiral Spine is now an internationally recognized name in the scoliosis world. Doctors from around the world refer their patients to be cared for by the teachers either in-person or virtually. Physical therapists come to learn from the staff on how to better care for their patients. Belmont University’s doctoral Occupational Therapy program has partnered with Spiral Spine; its students perform their capstone projects and do research on how to have better practices in the scoliosis world and increase the quality of life for those with scoli assisted by Spiral Spine.
