Andrea Abbott

Her Work: Massage Practitioner

“I try to make it as home-looking as possible”

Andrea Abbott tells me “I try to make it as home-looking as possible so people can be relaxed and comfortable because I am going to be touching them and that’s usually a very boundary oriented sort of thing so it’s really quite personal.” She needs to get people comfortable and “relaxed enough to let me do the work that I need to do.” Andrea Abbott tells me that she picked the wall colors and searched for something neutral and warm and nothing hostile or discomforting. She moved into this space about 2 years ago and tells me “when we moved here it gave me a chance to redo the entire thing the way it needed to be done.” Ms. Abbott did the setup herself with the help of several patients, a color consultant and a feng shui expert. She tells me that she really pays attention to details and even has a quilt so that the space feels more personalized. She adds a “personal touch, you can walk in here and know that everything was completely thought out.”

Andrea Abbott is located in a doctor’s office and is more into treatment work rather than spa-like massage. She says “I prefer to work with people who really need the help” so she works mostly with injuries. She says “it’s about fixing and making your quality of life the best I can make it.” She seems to have a strong relationship with her patients and tells me that “all of my relationships with my patients are very personalized to what they need to succeed and get where they need to be.”

 I ask Ms. Abbott to describe the work environment that allows her to be the most productive and efficient and she replies “I’m in it right now. This is it.”  I ask her what she likes about it and she tells me “everything about it, my location I love being near the water I love having everything within close range I love having that available to my patients.” She says “I like the fact that I have a chiropractor available to them that’s important because muscles and structure neither one works without the other.” Andrea Abbott has worked with the same Chiropractor for 9 and a half years. She then tells me that there is also a Naturopath/PT in the same office and she says to me “there’s nothing better than that because what I can’t do, he can do and he can also do the nutrition aspect of it, which just absolutely increases the quality of life in every way shape in form.” She seems to be so content with her location and the work environment around her, both the physical room she uses for massage treatment and the two other doctors who also work out of that office. Ms. Abbott says “the synergy between the four different modalities is so important in a recovery of anybody, be it car accident, or I played football and dislocated my shoulder, or I fell off the uneven bars, or I sprained my ankle in ballet, or ya know I just fell on my butt skiing.”

Ms. Abbott tells me about how she came to this work and says “all in all this is what I have found to be the most rewarding for me because I see progress in my patients almost immediately on a daily basis. I really can’t find anything better than that.” When I ask her if she could put her experience with her work into a few words she says “just rewarding, one word—that’s it.”