Massage Therapy student Paitynn Hippisley faced a challenge. How to monitor comfort and pain in a patient who was unable to share how they were feeling during their treatment.

Because her patient was non-verbal and couldn’t offer subjective verbal data – something massage therapists rely on heavily, says Hippisley – she had to look for different ways to monitor his comfort and pain and generate a treatment plan. 

Hippisley’s innovation and ingenuity led her to develop an award-winning massage therapy case based on six treatments she gave to a 35-year-old male patient with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy.  

“Even though a patient cannot talk, there is still communication,” she says. “I learned to watch for little behaviours that indicated happiness or relaxation, and by the end of the last session he said thank you to me. That felt like a huge win.”

Her second win came when judges with the American Massage Therapy Foundation recognized her case study with its Gold Award. Hippisley will present her work at the foundation’s conference in Phoenix, Arizona, this August. She is also taking steps to have her case study published.

Ask any MacEwan Massage Therapy student, says Hippisley, and they will tell you that writing the case report at the end of the program’s second year is the culmination of two years of hard work. It combines everything students learn in the program – conducting in-depth assessments, using research libraries, developing research-informed treatment plans and tracking the results of that treatment using evidence-based measures.

“I never saw myself pursuing the research side of massage therapy, but this experience opened my eyes to the importance of this type of work and the opportunities it can offer,” she says. 

But for now, Hippisley is focusing her massage therapy career in another direction. After spending several years working in adventure tourism lodges, she is taking what she learned into the backcountry, working as a registered massage therapist at remote fishing and heli-skiing lodges. 

“I love the lifestyle working at seasonal lodges has to offer and am excited that I can use my massage therapy education in this unique way.” 

Know a student who is doing great things? Email communications@macewan.ca to suggest them for a Student Snapshot story.