Today we’d like to introduce you to Cameron Cietek.
Hi Cameron, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
12 years old on vacation with my family, and we’re in the hot tub. I’m too young to stay in so I dangle my legs in and start rubbing my mom’s neck and shoulders since I know she loves massages, but she can’t afford them often. I realize how simple it is to feel which muscles are tight, loose, and she says it feels amazing. The next week she buys me a foot reflexology book, and I practice on her feet. She gets in a car wreck and has a bulging disc in neck and herniated disc in low back. She came home from the physical therapist and chiropractor one day in so much pain. I asked if she’d lay down and let me try to help. She laid on the living room carpet while I felt along her spine, feeling her sacrum, the swelling in the low back, and the swelling in the neck. To me the answer was simple – shift her hips to open her sacrum to let the swelling flow down to her legs and do the same with her arms for her neck swelling. I communicated with my hands to her body and told it what I wanted it to do, and it just listened, and the swelling and pain went down.
13 years old my best friend is diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, and POTS. She went from being a star soccer player to having to quit at 16. She was constantly fatigued, pained in all her joints, and supposedly her spine was losing strength quick. Her doctors couldn’t find a solution except to give her medication that weakened her immune system in an attempt to prevent her own cells from attacking herself. To me, this sounded silly, but it wasn’t my experience and who was I to challenge her doctors. I gave her hands-on work hundreds of times over 8 years. I researched all about the “diseases” and tried to find a solution to her issues. Once I was in my early 20s, and I was a Reiki master; we worked on energy pathways, she started seeing amazing results!
I’m 14 years old trying out for my high school soccer team. Day 2 of tryouts, and my back starts to feel like someone is stabbing me. “I’m fine,” I tell myself and keep playing. 20 minutes later, and I can’t run – it hurts to put any pressure on my left foot. I tell the coach I’m not feeling okay, and he tells me to keep playing. I pushed myself for the rest of the day until I woke up the next morning and couldn’t even roll over in bed due to the pain. It felt like someone was stabbing me with a scorching hot iron rod through my spine, halting all movement. Sitting up was even worse; I collapsed back onto my bed. My father used an HSA account and tried his best to avoid the medical community, so he wasn’t thrilled when I told him I needed to see someone. He told me to see the athletic trainer during tryouts that day. The trainer didn’t believe the pain I was having when I told her I thought it was bone-on-bone grinding of my hip and spine. She said, “Just stretch your hamstrings” and told me to go back and play. I kept trying, and yet it was so difficult for me to play. I kept messing up and knew something was really wrong.
I get into the physical therapy office with eyes full of excitement to get better and get back on the field. Day 1, they put me face down on a bed and put little patches on me that caused the area to spasm. He said it may hurt a little, but to let him know. He turned up the spasms and walked away. A moment later it started really hurting, and I picked my head up to tell him it hurt, and he was nowhere to be found. I reached up and turned off the machine and in doing so, aggravated my back even worse. Day 1 not so great. 3 days a week I got up early before school, and my dad drove me to the PT, and not a single day did I ever feel better. Their solution after 6 months was that they didn’t know what was causing my pain because none of their protocols were working for me. They gave me a rolled-up hand towel to bring from class to class to put behind my low back because the pain was so bad sitting in a chair I couldn’t focus let alone listen to my teachers and learn anything. I struggled to carry my backpack and navigate my 3-story big square of a high school. I was constantly late to class because it took me minutes to climb the 24 stairs between floors, and I was rejected an elevator pass due to “being an athlete” without any visible signs of injury.
Finally, in the 7th month of PT, they gave me something helpful – stretch my right butt muscle and strengthen my core. From that day on, I did an ab workout in the morning and an ab workout after school – every single day for the next 5 years. I became addicted to working out – because for the first time, I wasn’t in chronic pain! I was able to move, run, play soccer, and feel strong again. I was in the best shape of any of my athlete friends because I didn’t have any rest days. I tried having a rest day, and my pain came back.
3 years later, I decided to go to college for mechanical engineering – I wanted to redesign the braking system in cars – squeezing the wheel seemed antiquated. My father was an engineer, my brother was in nanoscale engineering at UAlbany, and I really wanted to go to WPI or Clarkson University. In January of my senior high school year – after applying to all my colleges and waiting back for letters, my sister asks me, “Hey, are you sure you want to be an engineer? You’re so into fitness, exercise, and maybe you should follow that as a career path.”
It got me thinking about the physical therapy office I went to, and I thought, “Well, I’m sure I can be better than them and maybe truly help people like myself get quicker better,” and so I applied to the only physical therapy program still accepting applications. A little 3,000-student school called Husson University in Bangor, Maine. I get in and decide to commit to it. My father is shocked but supports me anyways. Luckily, this school wanted to ensure its freshman wanted to actually be PTs, so our freshman seminar course was only PT students, and we talked about our future careers.
We learned
1. 90% of us would work with older people who will be angry at you for bothering them
2. I’ll spend as much time with patients as I will be filing insurance paperwork
3. Due to insurance policies, if someone comes in with shoulder pain, we’re only allowed to work within a 3″ x 3″ diameter of the shoulder. The same professor telling me this was the anatomy professor who had just taught us that most times when people are in pain, the problem is not located where the pain is but is usually in the next joint on the diagonal side (i.e., if the left shoulder hurts, it’s either the right neck or the right hips that is causing the problem).
BUT HE JUST TOLD ME INSURANCE WON’T LET ME WORK ON THAT??? What’s going on here…???
How ridiculous. I called my mom that night and told her I wanted to drop out. I finally made the connection as to why the PTs I went to took 7 months to actually help me… the protocols don’t apply to all bodies, and by law they have to follow protocols if they want to get paid.
I’m out. I finished the year and dropped out.
Within months I researched massage therapy and told my parents I wanted to do that. “But you need a 4-year degree Cameron” “What if you get injured? You won’t have a backup” “You’re too smart for that,” is what my parents told me.
It didn’t matter – I was in.
Day 1 of classes was “Intro to acupressure,” and we’re all sitting in a circle on square pillow, and the teacher tells us to close our eyes and breathe – we were about to meditate. I couldn’t believe it – no wonder my dad said this was a waste of my time – I’m here to learn muscles, bones, and how to fix it – not sit and breathe. The next teacher gave us a required homework of 10-minute daily meditation and to journal about it. For the first 2 months, I faked it and just wrote whatever. It wasn’t until 4 months into school that I actually meditated, and I couldn’t believe it! It was the most amazing thing I’d ever experienced. I wanted to meditate more than be awake and conscious – I had so much pent-up trauma that I hadn’t processed that the floodgates were opened, and I gave myself permission to cry whenever sadness came or yell when I was angry. Now, 4 months into school, I’m still a super-athlete. The class loved me because I was a lean 180 pounds of muscle mass, and you could see every muscle on my body – it was so easy to learn the muscles when you could see them popping out instead of covered my adipose tissue.
Then…came plumb line alignment day. A substitute teacher came in and pinned a string on the ceiling and taped it to the ground so it’d be straight. He told each of us to go stand side-by-side with it, and we’d measure how aligned our bodies were compared to the string. I was about the 8th person to go. The first 7 were pretty good – just a few minor things out of alignment that the teacher could easily teach them how to activate the right muscles and stand up straight.
But for me… I was a zig-zag pattern next to the string. My ankles were too far back, my knees too forwards, hips angled, low back too curved, mid-back not curved enough, and my neck too curved – oh, and plus my shoulders were in the wrong spot, and so were my elbows and hands.
The teacher tried to help me “stand up straight” using his feet, hands, and head to help me hold the right spot, and he still had 4 more things to correct. He said to me, “Cameron, I can’t help you alone; we need another set of hands,” and then he went on to assess the next 15 students. I remember feeling so defeated that I was utterly misaligned, and I felt broken. I had been exercising and working out daily and was able to manage my pain, but 1) If I stopped working out the pain came back, and 2) I didn’t have a long-term solution.
To think, I was the strong, athletic young buck to help everyone learn muscles, and yet my entire body was out of whack.
I became obsessed with standing up straight and sought out chiropractors to help me. There was a strong innate desire to heal the 9 problem areas identified by the assessment. And then, in my studies, I learned about rotation of joints and realized my 9 issues were just symptoms, and if I could just find the 1 original problem I could work backwards and fix everything. I was constantly asking hyper-specific questions in class about my body and would stop listening to the lecture, go stand in the back of the room, and try to fix myself. Several of my teachers said to me, “Cameron, you need to love yourself as you are. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to fix yourself. You’re perfect as you are, there’s a reason why this happened to you, and it’s okay to accept that.”
Hearing the feedback only motivated me deeper. I was going to show them I will fix myself AND I won’t go crazy doing it.
Upon graduation, I asked my dad if he would invest in my massage company instead of helping me pay for college to which he denied. He said, “Cameron, you need a 4-year degree, or you’ll never get a good, stable job,” and we fought for months about this. I didn’t want a good, stable job – I wanted dedicated time and space to heal myself, figure out the 1 problem and figure out how to fix it. Owning my own clinic would give me money, time, space, and the freedom to do that.
But of course, instead of that, I was enrolled at UConn to study neurobiology and physiology – the study of brains, life, and function of how they interact.
I chose it because it was the only degree I saw that would help me be a better massage therapist and give me some insights on how to heal myself. I also had a part-time job M, W, F at a massage envy spa 30 minutes from campus. I was working myself to death taking physics, organic chemistry, and 3 other classes, then driving an hour round-trip to work. And when I was home, I spent my time meditating, foam rolling, stretching, searching for clues about how to fix myself. I did as little schoolwork as possible to maintain my GPA because my main intention was self-healing. After my first semester, I told my dad I wished I could drop out to focus on healing and then come back to school. I was actually taking really cool classes with fascinating info, but my brain and energy was so introspective I missed out on a lot of the information. In my second year, I started seeing a great chiropractor who saw that I had an excessive growth in my lumbar spine near my sacrum – he had never seen it and said he’d monitor it. I loved his work and shadowed him several times, telling myself I was going to be a chiropractor after my bachelor’s.
One of my 9 issues was my right shoulder – it was dislocated but had fused itself to the wrong position. The chiro wasn’t able to “pop” it back in and so I asked him if it’s safe for me to work on it and I told him my theory. He said, “You can try but it’s unlikely, and you may hurt yourself so be careful.”
I go home and use my foam roller and lacrosse ball on my chest muscles, arm, and shoulder, and within 30 minutes a deep, booming “POP” comes out and wakes up my girlfriend who was sleeping. She asked if I was okay, and I yelled a victory shout! I had been working on that for almost 2 years, and low and behold, my own work opened it up! I called my chiro, and he was shocked and told me to rest it and not do anything. Of course, I didn’t listen and started doing shoulder mobility exercises – and at that moment I realized I couldn’t be a chiropractor. In 12 months of seeing him, he couldn’t fix it and then told me how unlikely it was rather than motivating me and giving me support.
Physical therapy off the table, now so was chiropractic. So, what was I going to do with this knowledge I’d acquired? How do I make money? How do I convince people I know how to help them heal themselves?
My girlfriend at the time wanted to be a doctor for refugees in the Middle East, and I was now contemplating osteopathy or naturopathy to help bolster my credentials upon sharing my skillsets. That summer, we went to a Greek island for a whole month to work in the medical facilities there. I went as a massage therapist, and she went as a med student working with the Afghan refugee crisis. Whilst there, I realized these people had never experienced safe touch before. Most the people for the first week had simple muscle issues – soreness, neck pain, and some gym rats. I felt undervalued and spoke to the doctor on staff. She said, “that’s all you’re qualified for Cameron, I can’t just send you some of these people who need medications” again furthering my desire for an additional medical certification just to show people I know what I’m doing.
Long story short, I went around talking to people and giving free services when I wasn’t scheduled at the clinic. In the camp, I built up reputation, and on the 3rd week, the first female client came in. She brought her female friend, as it was seen as unsafe to go into a closed room with a man without a friend. I had learned to say, “Where is your pain?” in their language, and she pointed to her head. She kept on 2 hoods and had her hair in a massive braid – and she only wanted me to touch her head. Within 30 minutes of hands-on work, she got up and gave me a huge smile and an even bigger hug. She fumbled over “thank you” and left in glee. The following day, one of the translators came over to me and asked me about our session and what I did. I told him I did some Reiki, gentle touch, and light stretching. He informed me that she had a headache for over 12 years, had seen countless doctors in Afghanistan, and now here in the clinic, taking medications and following their protocols exactly to no avail. She was completely pain-free and had remained pain-free the whole day and time I was there. We were only there for 11 more days, and my schedule was completely full for the next 11 days. Men, women, and children of all types were coming with various concerns. The medical doctor was baffled. Some of the patients she saw last week were waiting to see me and didn’t want their medications anymore. I couldn’t really explain the how or why, but I just knew it was helping the people.
Due to my lack of knowledge of the how and why, it motivated me to pay more attention in my classes, and maybe I’d get some answers. This continued to spark my desire to go to medical school and study the traditional ways of “how” and “why,” and maybe I could bridge the gap and bring my hands-on medical approach to the world.
I graduated in December 2019 and decided to create a massage company with the same substitute teacher that couldn’t quite help me correct my posture that day. I helped supply materials and cover rent and thus had access to take clients there or use the space for workshops. I was also applying to med schools and hoping to work part-time as a massage therapist to pay for school. Well, 2 and a half months later, I got a notice that the clinic was closed, and we weren’t allowed to work. If any of us were caught entering with a client, there was $15,000 fine enforced by the state. Like everyone, I was freaked out a bit by covid and bummed that I couldn’t work. I figured 2 weeks off my job wasn’t so bad, and I started scheduling appointments for late March. Once 2 weeks were done, and the lockdown wasn’t lifting, I started getting suspicious. As a student, I studied viruses intensely and actually asked my mom for a virus textbook for Christmas when I was 20. I wanted to re-design a new technology to fight Zika. In my senior year of college, I worked with mRNA technology. I was creating circular pieces of DNA and learning how to “cut” the DNA and insert a strand of mRNA, and then “close” the DNA back up. It’s a fascinating process and one that, according to the 2019 data while I was in college, made it impossible to execute on a large scale in the body.
Quite familiar with viruses, how they interact, and how to deal with them made me skeptical and quite angry that I wasn’t allowed to help people with my skillset, and we had to follow those “protocols” that in my experiences never really worked as intended. Then I realized – med school was off the table too.
So now I can’t do PT, chiropractic, MD, DO… so how do I get a job providing my healing services? The massage world doesn’t want this, they just want to relax. The medical world thinks I don’t know anything. How do I get people to know about my story and how I can help them? More school? How do I even move forward?
After 4 weeks of lockdown, my dad came into my room and told me that Georgia was open for massage therapy and joked that I should move there. My girlfriend was in her last semester of college, and we were supposed to graduate together in May, but they canceled everything. She was done May 10th. So, for all of April, I worked to transfer my massage license to GA, apply for jobs down there, and looked for a suitable place for us to live. So, on May 11th, after her last final, we drove 15 hours to Savannah, GA, and stayed in an Airbnb. On day 2, we walked around Broughton St, and we didn’t see a single mask. The bars were full of patrons breathing on each other! I felt like I was in a different country! I walked into the first spa I saw and asked if they were hiring. I left my girlfriend stranded for 1.5 hours (in the shopping district of course) while I had my interview. They loved my services and were desperately hiring to keep up with the influx of people coming in wanting massages. They offered me $40/hour (WAY more than the $17/hour I was paid at MassageEnvy), and we went to celebrate. I told them I was still waiting for my GA massage license, but they said I could start working ASAP.
The next 5 days in Savannah, we explored neighborhoods, looked at beautiful architecture, and fell in love with the city. The day before we went back home, the spa asked if I would work, and I was paid over $300 cash for the day. I told them I’d be back in 2 weeks on the 1st of June. So, I came back and told my family I was moving to Savannah, Ga with my girlfriend. We were met with nothing but bad vibes – “Oh that’s a dangerous city, don’t move there.” “They don’t wear masks??? You’re gonna kill someone!” “It’s too hot there; you’ll hate it.”
That was the final straw to push me out of my home state. After being denied an opportunity to work and share my hands-on healing with people since “I’m not medical,” like a PT office or chiropractor, I was furious and decided I was going to create my own school and teach my knowledge. I’ll create a modality to heal people in ways that PTs, chiros, and orthopedics were unable to help me.
We moved to Savannah with $300 in our bank account. After 2 months of being there, my girlfriend from right outside NYC texted our landlord calling him a “dick” for changing the wifi password without telling us, and we were almost evicted. I didn’t want that on my record, and so we agreed to move out within 7 days if and only if he gave us back our security deposit and pro-rated rent. We were stuck between should we pack up and move out and hope he gives us the money? Or stay and wait for the money before we leave? All the while, I had to work that whole week. It was an absolute nightmare. I ended up taking a day off work, renting a truck, and giving away some of our furniture since we now were leaving a 2-bedroom home with a yard for a 1-bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor. He never gave us our deposit; pro-rated rent, and we were only able to qualify for our apartment because I had just received $7,000 from the CT government for “unemployment due to covid” and had enough money in the bank to cover the $900/month rent for 12 months. Otherwise, my new job wasn’t enough to qualify.
At this point, we had sold my girlfriend’s car and only had my 212k miles Nissan Altima that was screeching and braking poorly. So, I had to bike 14 miles round-trip to go to work 5 days/week. All I kept thinking was, “Why the hell am I here doing this? I could literally be at home in CT collecting unemployment checks and not dealing with this crap.”
After a few more months of this, I realized the spa wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to be relaxing all the anti-covid people who drove hours or took planes to Savanah just for a weekend without a mask and a massage/haircut/nails.
I decided I would open my school and clinic and found a great location on Bull St and Anderson. I saw a yoga studio and a gym in the same building and figured I could offer some discounted sessions, and it’d be perfect. I spent a week writing my business plan, calculating, and realized it would take 100% of my savings to pay deposit, 1st and last month’s rent and buy the equipment I needed. When I went to check it out, I went to meet the owner of the gym who told me, “I won’t send any clients to you since I have my own massage room in the back – why don’t you come work for me instead?”
He offered me $50/hour, so I accepted and put the clinic plan on the backburner. Unfortunately, it was slow since he was a local gym, and many people were still skeptical of gyms or massages due to the pandemic. I was making less money than at the spa, and he kinda rubbed me the wrong way sometimes. There were no other employees, just he and I. I told him of my aspirations about my clinic and school, and he wanted to help. But he was just blowing smoke, and he wanted me to work for him and grow as an outlet of his company.
Out of the blue, I found out my girlfriend was pregnant March of ’21 and was ecstatic! But it sent me down a road of despair… I don’t have enough money, work is slow, and there’s no upward trajectory for me, and oh my god, it’s twins! I have double the mouths to feed. I exploded on my boss and quit because I couldn’t deal with the stress of it all. I decided I need a stable foundation and went back to my roots of being a super-strong athlete and spoke to the army about them paying for my medical degree. I weighed the options with my brother and decided I’m better off just joining as an officer and forget the med school. So, I changed to the Marines and spent 8 months working out, prepping, and preparing to be a marine officer. I was a top candidate in the Savannah area and was working out 3 days/week at 5am by myself because some other candidates just didn’t show up. To pay the bills, I got another job at another spa downtown. I had to support my now wife and 2 babies soon.
On the day my daughter was born, I was supposed to be in Jacksonville for a Marine function but decided to stay with my wife, and we ended up having an emergency C-section. Our baby boy had no heartbeat, and they didn’t know what happened, so they felt they needed to take our daughter out, and she was safer in the incubator than in my wife. Dealing with a dead son and watching my not-even 3 lb. daughter in a box was brutal. Having to call my job and ask for time off was worse. They wanted me to come in the next day and keep my 6-day/week schedule until I broke down crying about everything. Luckily, they gave me 2 weeks off, and then I had to go back to work – helping rich travelers relax and rubbing their feet while I’m mourning my dead son and wished I was at the hospital with my daughter.
I only worked there for a few more months until I decided to finally open the business for myself.
We rent a 4-bedroom home on the West side of Savannah; a quiet home next to a loud cargo train. I informed some of the people I met at the gym I opened up to and convinced people to come to this home in a “sketchy” neighborhood and receive the gift of my hands-on healing. About 1 month into that, a client pointed out that my location sucks, and there’s a new chiropractor on south side that does a lot of muscle work, and maybe we’d be a good team. I met with him and liked his modalities. I worked there and loved it – he paid my company, and my company paid me. What I really wanted out of the relationship was one where I could grow and again create my school to teach this skillset. I was getting tired of only making $ by working on clients and never having the energy or time to create the school and manifest my actual goal. When I brought this up to him, he made it clear he wanted to be boss and didn’t want a partnership. We were going on vacation to Colombia for my brother-in-law’s wedding for 2 weeks, and he told me not to come back to work when I return.
Thankfully, a client of mine texted me to book a session while I was away, and upon telling her I don’t have a location, she told me she knows of a spot! The day I came home, I went to check it out and took over the lease. That location is the current 1st rendition of the Savannah Holistic Co-op – an umbrella community focused on awareness, education, and healing the people of Savannah. Inside, we have an animal chiropractor, an acupuncturist, an herbal feminine guru, and myself as The Organic Mechanic in the Massage Body Shop.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Hah, yes… these lovely strength motivators. In chronological order:
1. Being incapacitated and struggling to walk at 14. Then, not being helped by the healthcare team for 7 months until they discovered the only solution to my pain was intense workouts. Having to workout 2x/day as a means of pain medicine is not ideal, but it’s better than drugs.
2. Having to work in spas for 5 years rubbing people’s feet and selling salt scrubs to make money instead of being able to truly help them and communicate my healing abilities. This was so frustrating for years. I didn’t know where to go to sell my services because no one seemed to want to actually get better. And the ones who wanted to get better only trusted doctors, not me.
3. Trying to balance my self-healing with life is extremely difficult. Some days I have to put my child, wife, or clients’ needs before mine, and I always have to remember to take my time for me or else I’ll have to quit. Self-healing throughout college, business starting, pandemic, and now parenthood has severely limited my time and slowed my progress in getting my ability to myself let alone share it.
4. Learning that after 5 years of working out and feeling great, my body was completely misaligned and was the worst my teacher had ever seen. Having to mentally swallow that pill and realize that I’m 19 years old and I’ve already tried the medical world, and it failed me. These massage therapists are telling me to just accept it and love myself. There has to be a middle ground. I don’t need surgery, and I don’t need some sappy self-love or a massage that doesn’t really fix my issues. I need to introspect, use science, reason, and logic to figure out what caused my problem, and then figure out how to fix it by myself. I realized I had to actually remove layers of the muscle I’d built up to protect my bone-on-bone grinding in my hip to actually get to the root of the problem and solve the hip rotation issue.
5. Having my first rendition with the perfect place shut down only 2 months in due to Covid pandemic and choosing between collecting unemployment or sharing my healing abilities with the world. Feeling like my own state, community, and clients didn’t care about me. When the pandemic hit, none of my clients, friends, or family reached out to me to help. Since I was a college student in 2019, I couldn’t collect unemployment, and I was left stranded and moved back in with my dad.
6. Within 2 months of moving to Savannah we were kicked out of our home. We had to fumble and find a new apartment in 7 days. Then, I had to bike 14 miles round-trip to work 5 days/week. All this while my friends and family in CT were collecting unemployment from the government and making more money than I was busting my butt down here in Savannah.
7. Losing one of my twins unexpectedly stopped me in my tracks… I had to call my spa manager and plead for her to take me off the schedule. I determined I would never have to ask for time off again. If I need time and space, I will own my business and take my time and space no matter what. Family comes first.
Having to show up to work and give relaxing massages to people 2 weeks after losing my son was the worst thing in my entire life. Leaving the hospital with my premature daughter and sliced open wife to go and help strangers while I just wanted to be with my family.
8. Starting 2 businesses and having a baby all while being 15 hours away from our nearest relative. The effort required by my wife and I to get up every morning to care for our daughter and manage our companies is extreme. Add-on that we don’t have any access to free babysitting from mom, sister, aunts, or friends. We are in a foreign location, without stable income, trying to make this work. We both have amazing skillsets and decided not to be doctors, and it has really led us to not have the time to take care of our own health.
9. Opening up my first “clinic” in a sketchy neighborhood on the west side of Savannah. Many of my clients refused to come since it was so far away, and they didn’t trust it. Others wouldn’t come back because of the location or train or the fact that my wife and baby were home.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Massage Body Shop?
I specialize in hands-on healing – massage, bone re-positioning, fascial restructuring, brain clearing, artery support.
I am known for providing long-term solutions to chronic pain. I am known for having hands like an MRI machine than can sense and identify problems unseen to everyone else.
I am known for giving 100% devotion in every session to aid in fixing the problem. I am known for helping solve “uncured” medical issues. I am known for running overtime in my sessions, explaining the homework exercises until the client knows exactly how to do it properly.
The difference between me and others is that I combine the skillsets of PTs, chiros, massage therapy, orthopedics, athletic trainers, and an engineer into one. Now, I’m only qualified as a massage therapist but having seen and worked with the people in the other categories, I know what works and what doesn’t work from them – especially as a patient with my own injuries! I didn’t need to be taught how to re-position wrists, ankles, hips, shoulders, and elbows in my clients – it came naturally when I was 19 at my first job, and now, I have refined it to a point where I feel like I’m doing non-invasive surgery.
People with 20-year-old injuries that “need” surgery have left with it gone on the first day, and their orthopedic surgeons dumbfounded.
I’m most proud of my ability to exclusively be a word-of-mouth practice. My journey has been rough, and I still don’t know how to communicate my true abilities, but somehow my clients do. Without them supporting me, I would be an officer in the Marines, and no one would know what I do.
I want them to know that if they have any concern with their body, mind or soul that isn’t currently being addressed properly by their current healthcare team, they need to come in. I find people get very complacent with “managed” conditions and are content to keep taking their pills forever.
In my 90-minute consultation, we do a deep dive of medical history. We compile all the puzzle pieces to identify what is happening and why. We create a long-term solution for you on day 1. The solution often involves slowly taking medications away, making habit changes, and no commitment to me or high expenses. I’m here to help you long-term because the PTs, chiros, and doctors didn’t have the time to help me, and they still don’t have the time to help you.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up.
Well, honestly, my favorite childhood memory was the day I stopped being in agonizing pain. I was 14, and I remember it was early April. My injury occurred 8 months previously in August. There were days I couldn’t even roll over in bed let alone eat, learn, or be a kid. It was a beautiful spring-April day, and at PT that morning the doc put an exercise ball under my legs and told me to squeeze it and bring it to my chest. For the first time, I activated a certain muscle in my lower abdomen that seemed to decrease the pain in my back. Then, he had me do our normal stretch routine, which actually aggravated the pain again.
So I went to school, had a normal day, and actually had a baseball game that day. Now, at this point, I was semi-functional and could play the slow-moving game of baseball albeit gritting my teeth through the pain. This was the first sports season I actually go to play a sport after missing soccer and ice hockey season.
That night, I went home and use a pillow to replicate the exercise ball workout. I rolled over afterwards and stretched my right butt muscle, and then did a 15-minute ab workout. Upon standing up, the pain WAS GONE! I literally couldn’t believe it and remember running downstairs to tell my dad in the middle of his workout that I was free of pain! I could be a kid again, and maybe I could play soccer or hockey next season! This memory trumps all other memories as a child simply because of the impact that it gave me the ability to be me again. I was no longer convinced I was broken. It gave me a sense of hope that I was able to get better.
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