During a service trip in Apam, Ghana, a fifth-year surgical resident was feeling intense pain one evening. She’d just completed a grueling day of surgeries, hunching over a too-short operating room table, and her neck and shoulders ached from overextension. But as she walked from the operating suite to the women’s dorms, she saw a beacon of hope: Amanda van Epps ’00 Fleischer.
As a muscle therapist, Fleischer was able to ease the resident’s discomfort, increase circulation in her soft tissues, and minimize inflammation by using massage techniques on her upper body. “I would just have her get on the table and I would try to provide her relief in the cervical thoracic spine area,” Fleischer remembers. The next day, the resident was able to rejoin her team in providing life-saving medical care for her patients dealing with issues ranging from gynecological problems to malaria.
Fleischer joined a team composed of doctors and students on the 2023 trip, which was organized by Building Solid Foundations. The nonprofit provides life-saving surgeries to patients in Ghana who would otherwise not be able to receive medical care. For example, one woman whom Fleischer’s team treated had extensive fibroid tumors that had progressed to the point of needing to be surgically removed — her uterus weighed nearly 40 pounds. “In the United States, if a woman has fibroid tumors, it isn’t allowed really to get to that point,” Fleischer explains. As the only massage therapist on the trip, she often toted her massage chair around the medical service area to work on the health care professionals after they finished a surgery or had a quick break between meetings with patients.
Some confuse muscle therapy with massage therapy, but Fleischer, who practices mainly in King of Prussia, Pa., is quick to point out the key difference between the two professions. “The work I do is much more healing oriented than relaxation oriented,” she notes. “So most of my clients who seek me out have had some sort of an injury.” Her day-to-day work entails massaging clients who are going through any number of health obstacles. “Sometimes when you are helping someone get over an injury, there does, unfortunately, have to be a level of discomfort. I shoot for what I call the therapeutic level of discomfort, not the, ‘Oh my goodness. When is she going to stop?’ type of discomfort.” In addition to her board certification, Fleischer is a preferred practitioner in the Society for Oncology Massage.
She first became interested in providing her services to Building Solid Foundations in 2018, when a client in her student clinic mentioned an upcoming trip through the organization. As someone interested in outreach and providing education about muscle therapy, Fleischer was immediately on board and left for two weeks in Ghana that fall. The 2023 trip was her second, after a pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another important portion of her work there is providing human touch to patients living with devastating illnesses. “In Ghanaian society, members of the HIV community are ostracized,” Fleischer says. “They, a lot of times, are not accepted by their families, and they haven’t had any sort of human touch in years.” During the service trips, she carves out time in her schedule to provide physical and emotional comfort to those patients. She went as far as asking the doctors to notify her when a new patient was admitted “because they’re human beings and they deserve to know that they are worthy of life, that they are worthy of touch, that they’re worthy of connection.”