Who we are
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Mike Macy
Mike has helped patients resolve health and life challenges for 30 years. He combines the latest and most advanced manual therapy and mind-body techniques to release restrictions, regardless of location, duration, or cause.
My very first patient had been inconsolable with grief and survivor’s remorse for weeks when I was sent by train across six states to help her. It took me over a week to get "M" smiling and laughing again. We were both 12 years old.
Although I trained as an Emergency Medical Technician while being a backcountry ranger for the National Park Service, I wasn’t destined to become a manual therapist at that time. Indeed, after college, I spent four years in the North and on the Gulf of Alaska on increasingly long and dicey expeditions. After almost freezing to death on a solo ski trip in the Yukon, I ended up in Hawaii, studying language and human behavior and earning my Masters degree in English Literature. That training contributes to my ability to help patients re-write the story of their life. A car accident once back in Alaska led me to discovering and healing my childhood physical trauma and PTSD and becoming a body-worker.
For 25 years, I practiced manual therapy in Alaska. My 20+ courses in CranioSacral Therapy and Visceral Manipulation made me one of the most highly-trained in Alaska in either modality. I’m able to work on the body’s most critical and delicate structures like the heart, lungs, respiratory diaphragm arteries, nerves, and brain components. Most recently, I spent a year treating men and women from all five braches of the US Armed Forces at the USAF’s Pain Management Clinic in Anchorage. My wife and I moved to Bend, Oregon when funding for that position ended.
Thousands of hours of training with some phenomenal physicians and thirty years of practice have increased my knowledge and honed my skills, but I'm convinced that the two most important conditions for healing are safety and permission. I create the safety and guide my patients to giving themselves the permission. The rest is almost child’s play, as my patients at the Air Force Hospital in Alaska proved. The understanding that health depends on the patient’s permission to heal partly explains how distance healing can be effective. I’ve had my challenges, but life is good now, and I get to help others.
I have written a book on the importance of subtle internal mechanics to health and healing. BodyWise: What You Need to Know to Get and Stay Healthy and Prevent Illness and Injuries published in 2019. I am also starting to teach colleagues the techniques I developed in order to helping patients.
To see how Mike’s training compares to others, visit IAHP.com. For all his training, please see his Curriculum Vitae.