Article about us in Glade Living

Glade Living Story Arukah Touch

by Ed McCall

ARUKA TOUCH IS All About Feeling Better!

We all know how first impressions are often lasting impressions. Life and business partners, Lee Forbes and Katrina Dumonceaux, started Arukah Touch after dealing with their own personal health challenges. I easily recognized that their belief in the healing, relief, and care that they offer their patients is sincere and real. Arukah Touch is about therapeutic massage and structural balancing, a means of addressing and eliminating postural distortions caused by muscular tension and imbalances. Utilizing the principles of physics and medicine they offer results that are custom tailored to your personal needs.

The pair, who made their way from Asheville, NC, believe that the human body often is inefficient in its opposition to gravity, which leads to musculoskeletal pain caused when the body’s weight is shifted off bones and onto muscles. Sometimes these shifts are caused suddenly, as in the case of an injury or accident. Others happen gradually over time, like hours sitting at a computer, until at some point the discomfort becomes great enough to affect quality of life. Often this shifting, altering, and compensating develops trigger points, referral of pain to distant areas far from the actual cause, deviations or unevenness in leg lengths, misalignment of the spine and pelvis, depressed or elevated shoulder girdles, and overall poor posture that result in a diminished quality of life. Their treatments focus on muscles that are “locked” short from chronic excess muscle and nerve tension (CEM & NT) and muscular imbalances that can cause poor posture, musculoskeletal (back) pain, and restriction of body movements (like a golf swing).

Both Lee and Katrina are graduates of the North Carolina School of Advanced Bodywork, where they learned their craft from industry guru Kyle Wright, whose care had brought them both back to good health. Lee had suffered a bad fall (he is still the owner of a restorative roofing company that has done work at The Biltmore as well as The Greenbrier) and was temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. Katrina found the treatments now available at Arukah Touch solved the back problems she had developed from years of caring for her special needs daughter.

Lee has had success relieving pain in clients who suffer from worksite injuries, fibromyalgia, frozen shoulder, plantar fasciitis, TMJD, sciatica, and lower back issues. “Often we see amazing results on the first visit,” he says. “It is awesome to see someone get up from the table feeling so much relief. My hope is that one visit does the trick.” He utilizes the principles of myofascial release, neuromuscular balancing, and proprioceptor response to achieve patient relief. His real gift, according to Katrina, is that he “re-engineers old injuries to reconstruct the cause, and then he addresses that using our treatments.”

Katrina finds it very satisfying to help clients who deal with chronic pain and other soft tissue issues find relief. She uses detailed assessment and palpation to determine the source of discomfort. Then she develops a treatment plan individually tailored for restoring balance to that person’s body. “In my clinical experience,” she says, “I’ve come to learn that everyone has some sort of pain whether it comes from stress, old injuries, or imbalance in the body.” Her goal is to help folks experience the same kind of improvement in their quality of life as she did utilizing the techniques and resources that are practiced at Arukah Touch.

Aside from conditions already mentioned, Lee says they address all of the following: carpal tunnel, nerve impingement, scar softening, digestive distress, chronic headaches and migraines, special needs stretching, and hip and pelvic pain.

Their location at 962 Ritter Drive in Beaver, next to Bill Kinder and Associates, is convenient to all Glade Springs residents, but they also make home visits for those who aren’t mobile or prefer the privacy that their home affords. You can check out their many services online at www.arukahtouch.com or call 681-207-1617 to arrange a consultation or service. If you do, I think you will find as I did, that first impression to be quite lasting. They love making people feel better.