EMB #505: Osteopathic Wellness

Christal grew up in a small farming community in Southern Saskatchewan. As an avid athlete with her share of injuries, she had little assistance from the medical profession available to her in her small town so decided to study Athletic Therapy at Mount Royal College. She wanted not only to understand what was wrong and how to recover but how to prevent injuries in the first place.

Through college she was able to continue with her athletics; both as a competitor and as a therapist. She was a gold medalist Badminton player at MRC and she was able to be on the sidelines of many of her favorite sports (including football, hockey, baseball and volleyball) as well as sports she had little experience with (such as field hockey, basketball and judo) throughout university.

After completing her Athletic Therapy diploma from MRC and her Kinesiology degree at the U of C, she continued to work with hockey in both the Alberta Junior Hockey League, Heritage Junior B Hockey League and the Women’s Western Hockey League. She worked in private practice as an AT until requiring knee surgery (an injury sustained at playing hockey) which introduced her to the world of insurance where she worked for a number of years.

Working as a rehabilitation specialist she recognized a challenge in the insurance and medical fields. There was a group of people in pain for which there is no apparent reason discoverable in today's traditional diagnostic tests or imaging. According to medicine and the insurance world, nothing was wrong with them.

Christal had learned what she could in the insurance world and was anxious to get back into helping people directly in a clinical setting. After losing her mom to Cancer and her grandmother 6 months later, she learned life was just too short not to be doing what you were meant to do. But the question remained on how to help the population with unexplained pain – she needed to find a solution.

After research into various educational options she found osteopathic manual therapy. A method to understand in more detail the anatomy of the human body and how all parts were interrelated. A method to understand WHY people had pain. She started her osteopathic studies in 2006 at the Canadian College of Osteopathy Vancouver Campus (now called the Canadian School of Osteopathy Manual Practice). She returned to private practice in 2007.

Christal graduated after completing her thesis on vestibular disturbances in the post concussed active population. She continues to be a certified Athletic Therapist and has continued post graduate studies in endocranial spasm work, psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology, emotional work within the fluids, mechanical link, neuro-kinetic therapy, and energetic work through the medicine wheel.

In January 2019 she opened Take Flight Osteopathic Wellness with the goal of bringing hope to people who feared they’d have to live with the pain for the rest of their lives.

Take Flights Mission is To help you, your performance and Life Take Flight.