Swimming to a Better, Healthier Life
Combining her passion for swimming and helping others overcome limitations from physical disabilities, Yanira Estrada Ramírez created HAPHY (Health Aquatic Physiotherapy), a rehabilitation clinic that offers rehabilitation services mixing in aquatic techniques at low costs, including a program for economically and socially marginalized patients.
For Yanira Estrada Ramírez, swimming has always been a way of life. In fact, she started swimming in Mexico City as a child before she could even walk. In 2007, Yanira took a job at a local pool, and began appreciating and understanding the healing benefits of aquatic therapy in people with physical disabilities and other chronic afflictions. She became so passionate about the idea of combining swimming and medicine to help others that she enrolled in school to study physical therapy. A few years later she was a Physical Therapy graduate from UNITEC Mexico.
As she continued to learn the necessary techniques and seeing the results in her patients, she decided to open HAPHY by Aquasense, which grew out of a project at UNITEC called Aquasense with the support of UNITEC Business Incubator. Seeing the success and potential of Aquasense, Yanira secured investors and operational partners who have invested time and money in this project without hesitation, making this project come to life. HAPHY by Aquasense is an innovative treatment facility that offers patients a new hope for recovery. To assemble her staff, Yanira reached out to highly qualified medical specialists and, through a volunteer system, engaged them to provide free hours of diagnosis and treatment on a regular basis. Volunteers typically spend eight hours a day, two days a week, treating patients.
HAPHY’s integral therapeutic approach aims to improve its patients’ health, most of whom are children and elderly people, without medication. Its mission is to improve the quality of life of those suffering from lifelong disabilities with preventive, corrective treatments and ongoing support. Thanks to Yanira’s hard work and dedication, and the support of partnerships with local universities, insurance companies, physiotherapists, and sports clubs, the Aquasense project has served more than 500 patients since it was launched in 2015. Throughout the year, it has incorporated more than 15 volunteer rehabilitation specialists.
“The most important thing for us is health – health for the people who work here, and health for the patients that come here,” said Yanira. “I love the satisfaction of going to sleep at night, knowing that today was a great day because I helped someone else have a better quality of life.”
