Graduate of the Muscular Therapy Institute, Cambridge, MA 1998

A 1998 graduate of the Muscular Therapy Institute in Cambridge, Laura was a faculty member there for 10 years and taught a variety of classes including Muscular Therapy Technique, Practice Development, Sports Massage, Perspectives on Bodywork and Business Development. A perpetual student, she is deeply committed to the role of educating people about the benefits of massage. She has been an Item Writer for the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork and continues her own education through advanced coursework.
Long an advocate of the incorporation of massage into conventional medical therapies, Laura has participated as a therapist in a National Institutes of Health-sponsored study (with M. Toth, J. Kahn, T. Walton, A. Hrbek, D.M. Eisenberg, and R.S. Philips) on “Therapeutic Massage Intervention for Hospitalized Patients with Metastatic Cancer” at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She also served as liaison between the Muscular Therapy Institute and the Malden Family Health Clinic and with The Boston Medical Center, in designing an externship and volunteer program for massage therapists working with patients suffering with cancer.
Laura thinks of her work as a partnership between client and therapist, sometimes centering on reassurance and safety and other times centering on remedial intervention and facilitating the body’s own healing processes from chronic pain, stress, and/or specific injuries. She searches for different approaches and philosophies to help people connect with the wisdom of their own bodies and incorporates several modalities to achieve the results best suited to clients’ particular needs. The principle that guides her work is her strong belief in the power of touch and how, in its simplest form, it can heal. A member of the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) since 1998, Laura is Nationally Certified in Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (NCTMB) and is a co-owner of Sollievo.