Geoffrey N.
1/5
It looks like Andrea has been recruiting people to post five-star reviews recently, anticipating this one-star one.
Andrea was my partnerâs key therapist and guide for the past two years. She was loyal and committed, helping my partner recover from a serious injury that has baffled medical science that Andrea likened to 60 whiplash injuries. My partner responded well to Andreaâs treatments in combination with work with an osteopath. Andrea played different roles at different times, most recently, a vital supportive role in integrating the osteopathâs work while down-regulating the nervous system. My partner started out extremely debilitated and dependent on Andrea but progressed to regaining a lot of engagement in her own life and becoming increasingly independent.
Unfortunately, Andrea got sick and had to stop working for a month. We know it was very hard for her, but was also extremely difficult for my partner, especially because Andreaâs absence coincided with the osteopath being out of town. My partnerâs health deteriorated rapidly during this period, struggling with severe intestinal blockage and other issues that Andrea would normally have been able to easily handle.
When Andrea returned, she didnât express any empathy for the effects that her unexpected sickness had on my partnerâs health, seemed disconnected, and seemed to have forgotten a lot of context, ignoring long-established guardrails agreed to previously. The first session went great, but in the second treatment Andrea changed her modality and protocols without discussing them first and that treatment ended up being very difficult to process.
Andrea then wrote us a letter saying she had decided to immediately discontinue services because of the difficulty it caused her own health to treat my partner. This defies logic, because obviously my partner was temporarily in a bad place because of the weeks without treatment and this would have easily resolved itself within another week or two of Andreaâs help. We tried several times to reach out with the intention of finding a solution but she refused to engage in any way. Worst of all, she took this unilateral action without first setting up a viable transition plan to another provider, as is legally required.
Since then, my partnerâs health has been on a steady decline. With her whole body recovering from having been turned into different forms of scar tissue, it took a lot of trust in Andrea to progress to the point where that release started to become spontaneous and cumulative. While this sounds like a good thing, when muscles don't have to rebuild strength and structures don't have time to reorganize, vital vascular, neural, and digestive pathways can become blocked. As Andrea was the only practitioner who could keep the tempo of this process under control, dropping her just as everything was coming to a head is particularly destructive. So far we have been unable to find another therapist able to turn this around. Overall, Andreaâs actions have caused immense amounts of needless pain and suffering and we are extremely concerned, not knowing where this will all end.
My advice is to only use Andrea if your health challenges are relatively straight forward and emotionally easy for Andrea to treat. Andrea is a very talented therapist, but from our perspective has serious difficulties with setting boundaries and with communication generally. Every day since she discontinued services has been a huge challenge, and I wouldnât want anyone else to find themselves in a similar situation. Andrea often tried to inspire my partner with a metaphor of rebirthing her own healthy self. But in this metaphor, what midwife would abandon their patient at the time of her greatest need?
