The Knowledge Summit: 3rd Annual Online Conference

Join us October 4th for this 3rd annual online conference which features an exclusive series of one-hour webinars with 5 evidence-based educators from across Canada and the UK. Created specifically for massage therapists and manual osteopathic practitioners, each session is designed to be easily integrated into your practice, offering practical applications that will increase your knowledge and improve your clinical skills. 

If you cannot attend live, do not worry, it is recorded and all who register will get access to the recording. The recording will be available within 48 hours of the event and this will be available for you to watch for 90 days.

Touch for Coherence of the Embodied Self: Looking at Massage Through the Lens of (En)Active Inference 

Presenter, Anna Maria Mazzieri is a researcher, educator and massage therapist in England.

In this session, Anna Maria will explore the use of touch in therapeutic contexts like massage therapy as a strategy for restoring the coherence of multi sensory information and how this relates to chronic pain. By explaining the framework of (En)Active Inference, she will present how the reliable, coherent sensory experience that touch provides can help us make sense of what we expect and what we actually experience.

Learning outcomes:

1. How to clinically reason massage within certain chronic pain conditions as a strategy which goes beyond relaxation and functional improvements.
2. Why and how to prepare a well-considered therapeutic context for massage as an integral part of the treatment

Practicing Pregnancy Massage in an Evidence-Imperfect World

Presenter Jamie Lynn Chediac is a seasoned Registered Massage Therapist (RMT) practicing in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

Pregnancy massage is widely practiced and deeply valued by clients, yet the evidence guiding safety, risk, and scope is often incomplete, indirect, or inconsistent. Massage therapists are frequently asked to navigate traditions, cultural practices, and client expectations alongside modern medical caution, without clear or unified guidance. This webinar examines how massage therapists can practice responsibly within this reality.

Learning outcomes:

1. Describe how pregnancy alters physiology in ways that are relevant to massage practice, and why these changes complicate simple safety assumptions.
2. Differentiate between evidence-based, evidence-informed, and tradition-based claims commonly found in pregnancy massage education.
3. Apply a risk-aware, ethically grounded framework for communicating boundaries and informed consent when evidence is incomplete

Creating Safe Spaces: Trauma Informed Care for Massage Therapists

Presenter, Lauren McLaughlin is a registered massage therapist in Hanwell, New Brunswick. She has over ten years of clinical experience and more than a decade of focused study in trauma and trauma-informed care. She holds a background in Social Work from the University of St. Thomas, with academic training in Indigenous Studies, Psychology, Sociology, and Social Work, disciplines that strongly inform her approach to education and practice.

This presentation introduces trauma-informed care for massage therapy, with a primary focus on understanding trauma through the biopsychosocial model and its relevance to assessment, treatment planning, and therapeutic relationships. Rather than focusing on trauma in isolation, this session explores how lived experience can influence the nervous system and shape a client’s experience, and how we as massage therapists can approach treatments through this lens.

Learning outcomes:

1. Understand trauma through a biopsychosocial lens and recognize how lived experience can influence a client’s nervous system and therapeutic experience.
2. Integrate the five pillars of trauma-informed care into communication, consent, and the creation of spaces where clients feel safe, respected, and empowered.
3. Reflect on the role of boundaries, self-awareness, and practitioner well-being in sustaining ethical, compassionate care, including strategies to support themselves in the presence of vicarious trauma, burnout and compassion fatigue.

Making a Pain Assessment

Monica Noy is an educator, researcher, former RMT and current osteopathic practitioner in Toronto, Ontario. She is passionate about advancing education in MSK fields, specifically in areas of critical thinking and basic science knowledge of mechanisms and management of pain. She has created and teaches a Philosophy and Science of Pain course for an Honours Bachelor program, a first for undergraduate pain education in the MSK field.

Making a Pain Assessment is founded on a science-based perspective that nociception is necessary for pain. It addresses one aspect of a known knowledge gap in pain education and enables learners to develop clinical reasoning for treatment planning based on identifying probable mechanisms of pain for any given presentation. The clinical descriptors of mechanism are reviewed and examples given. A framework for a pain assessment that can be integrated within clinical note-taking is provided.

Learning outcomes:

1. Identify clinical descriptors of pain used in clinic and research.
2. Understand an individualized pain assessment using an assessment framework.
3. Develop clinical reasoning in practice for pain treatment and management.

Best Practices: Lower Back and Pelvic Pain

Eric Purves is a clinician, educator, researcher and advocate for massage therapy. He has over 20 years of clinical experience, a masters degree in rehabilitation science, and over a decade of knowledge in evidence-based pain education. He has combined this information to provide you a practical educational experience in the treatment and management of lower back and pelvic pain conditions.

This presentation will help you to integrate current best evidence for treating painful conditions of the lower back and pelvic regions. We will cover risk factors, comorbidities and the prognosis for the majority of clinical presentations. You will learn how to simplify your assessment and observe a variety of movement and hands-on treatment ideas. 

Learning outcomes:

1. Simplify your assessment process by focusing on functional presentations
2. Incorporate movement into treatments to increase positive outcomes
3. Observe how to treat low back and pelvic pain more effective with patients in either, supine, side-lying or prone positions

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Please be aware that in providing advertising space to the advertiser(s), the Association (CMMOTA) is not providing an endorsement of any given course which may be advertised. Further, by advertising with CMMOTA does not mean that any professional liability insurance provider will recognize an advertised course as substantive for providing coverage for the practice of a modality or technique which may be attained within the training received. Further, the Association (CMMOTA) shall hold no responsibility, nor liability, for the content or accuracy of information which may be presented through the advertisement of a course, nor is Association (CMMOTA) approval of continuing education credits for any given course to be taken as an endorsement of the continuing education course, nor does any material presented through the advertisement of a continuing education course necessarily represent the views, values, or mission of the Association (CMMOTA).