Who We Are
Body Balance Therapeutic Massage is the only pain specialist clinic in the New River Valley, built for one purpose: solving chronic pain and injury, not just managing it.
We work with active adults dealing with chronic pain, acute injury, post-surgical recovery, or anyone who wants to stay ahead of a problem before it starts. Every plan begins with a real assessment, not a guess, because pain almost never lives where it appears to. The shoulder that hurts may be responding to a scar from a surgery years before. The foot that aches every morning may be driven by a pattern that starts at the hip. The neck that never fully releases may be a downstream consequence of a workstation that's been building the problem for years. We treat where it starts, not just where it shows up, which is why our results tend to last when other approaches haven't.
We're a clinical team, not a single practitioner, and we hold ourselves to a standard most massage practices don't: we never stop learning. The research on chronic pain, tissue healing, and how the nervous system learns and unlearns pain keeps evolving, and so do we. If something considered best practice five years ago has been shown to be less effective than a newer approach, we change. Every client gets care that reflects what we know now, not what was standard a decade ago.
That doesn't mean clinical has to mean sterile. You can't fully treat pain when the nervous system is on high alert, so a relaxing, caring environment is part of how we work, not an afterthought to it. We just don't stop there, the way most massage clinics do.
What Results Can You Expect?
We back that up with numbers, not just confidence: clients working with us see, on average, a 50% reduction in pain levels and a 50% increase in pain-free range of motion. And we stand behind the work with a 100% satisfaction promise.
Real outcomes, not projections. A client who came to us using a cane for plantar fasciitis walked through a grocery store on her own after four sessions. A client who couldn't lift her arm to open the blinds regained that movement in a single visit, once we found the actual source of her frozen shoulder. A runner who'd been through physical therapy for hamstring painthat kept returning finished a half marathon pain-free after we found what PT hadn't: the real source, high at the hip.
A Note From Our Founder
I didn't set out to open a pain specialist clinic. I set out to help people heal, and I haven't stopped figuring out how to do it better since.
I came to massage therapy through energy work and herbalism, looking for a clinical foundation, a license to touch, as I've always described it, before exploring the subtler dimensions of healing I'd always been drawn to. What I found in massage school was more than a foundation. I found a vocation. And what I found beneath my fingertips from the very beginning was something my training hadn't yet given me the language for: patterns in the tissue that I sensed were connected to a client's pain in ways I didn't yet fully understand. My intuition told me this was the missing piece. My nature told me to find it.
I've been finding it ever since. I founded Body Balance Therapeutic Massage in 2010 with a mission I understood personally: to help the active people of the New River Valley stay active. I'm an avid hiker and outdoorswoman, and I know what this community's relationship with the outdoors means to the people who live here. I also know, not just clinically but in my own history, what it costs when pain takes that away.
In high school I played violin seriously: private lessons, real skill, the kind of devotion that makes an instrument part of who you are. A chronic shoulder dislocation, and the surgery to correct it, ended that. The recovery was long enough that the skills I'd spent years building quietly slipped away. I never fully regained them.
I remember sitting with my violin in my arms, one arm in a sling, and crying. Not for the pain. For the loss. For the gap between who I'd been and who injury had, without asking my permission, made me.
I carry that moment into every session I do. When a client tells me the trail is gone, the golf game is unrecognizable, the kayak has been sitting in the garage for two years, I know that feeling. And I know it doesn't have to be permanent.
It is the moment someone gets off the table and moves differently. The way their body looks lighter, not just to themselves, but visibly, unmistakably, to anyone in the room. The specific quality of change in someone's face when they realize the thing they'd accepted as permanent isn't. The light that comes back into their eyes.
That is my purpose. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning. And it's why I built a team around me who share it.
— Carrie Boucher, LMT, Founder
Meet the Team
Today, Carrie works alongside Tod Whitehurst, LMT, and Katy Larson, LMT. Together, we approach every client as a whole person, with a specific history, specific goals, and a specific path forward built around who they are and what they're working to get back to.
Carrie Boucher, LMT
Founder
Carrie founded Body Balance Therapeutic Massage in 2010 and has spent every year since refusing to settle for yesterday's best practice when today's is available. Her story is above; her commitment to finding where pain actually starts, not just where it shows up, is the foundation everything else here is built on.
Tod Whitehurst, LMT
Tod's deep expertise in trigger point therapy, the precise identification and release of the specific muscular points that drive referred pain patterns throughout the body, adds a layer of clinical precision that makes complex, chronic pain presentations more fully addressable than any single technique alone.
Katy Larson, LMT
Katy came to the New River Valley from Oregon and brings a rare combination to her work: genuine clinical depth paired with a restorative quality that reminds clients why taking care of their body is one of the most generous things they can do for themselves.
Ready to Start?
The best next step is usually a conversation, not a commitment. Our free Meet the Therapist consult is exactly that: 15 minutes, no pressure, no obligation, just clarity on what's actually going on and what we'd recommend.
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