What We Are
Massage Therapy Nexus is an independent publishing platform and professional resource dedicated to the massage therapy profession in the United States. We publish original reporting, policy analysis, professional history, and advocacy resources for working massage therapists and those who care about the future of the field.
Why This Exists
The massage therapy profession has a problem that no association has been willing to name plainly: it built licensing laws, schools, certifications, and advocacy campaigns without first building a unified professional framework. The result is a profession in which the same debates — about medical massage, scope of practice, entry-level competency, insurance reimbursement, and interstate portability — recur decade after decade without resolution. It is the reason why our licensing laws vary so greatly across the US along with education requirements, ce requirements, scope of practice and requirements for teaching and creating schools.
Meanwhile, illicit businesses crowd the marketplace and go largely unaddressed. Pay remains low. Schools are closing. Therapists work in isolation without mentorship or support. The organizations that should be leading have spent their energy competing with each other and fighting each other.
Massage Therapy Nexus exists because the profession needs a publication willing to say this out loud — and to document it, historically and in real time.
What We Do
We publish the newsletter. The Massage Therapy Nexus newsletter covers current events in the profession — legislation, association decisions, insurance policy, research — with the historical context that explains why those events matter. Published weekly on Substack. [Subscribe here.]
We maintain the archive. The Nexus HUB is the most comprehensive free reference library in the profession: timelines and histories of every major organization, state-by-state licensing resources, the history of medical massage, national certification, continuing education policy, healthcare integration, and more. Built over more than a decade. Continuously updated.
We call things what they are. When associations make decisions that harm therapists, we say so. When credential programs mislead practitioners, we name them. When the profession repeats a mistake it has made before, we provide the historical record that proves it. This is not comfortable work. It is necessary work.
Our Editorial Standards
We distinguish news from opinion. When we report on events, we cite sources. When we express editorial positions, we say so. We correct errors when we make them.
We do not accept payment to promote products, programs, associations, or individuals.
We name organizations and individuals by name when their decisions are relevant to the profession. We invite responses and publish them when they are substantive.
About the Founder
Julie Onofrio, LMT has been a licensed massage therapist since 1987 — nearly four decades of practice, observation, and professional engagement. She has spent much of that time documenting the profession’s history, scanning and archiving primary sources that would otherwise be lost, and building the resource library that now forms the foundation of this site.
She founded Massage Therapy Nexus because she watched Massage Today — the publication that once asked hard questions — go quiet, and because the questions didn’t stop needing to be asked.
She is based in Washington State, where she has practiced and advocated for the profession throughout her career.
Support This Work
Massage Therapy Nexus is funded entirely by readers. There is no advertising, no association backing, no grant funding. If this work is useful to you, the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber to the newsletter.
[Subscribe to the Massage Therapy Nexus Newsletter →]