Meet Katrina Santillo, LMT

A Passion for Helping People

Katrina Santillo has known she wanted to work in health care since high school, when she used to joke with friends that she’d become a massage therapist one day. She didn’t take the idea seriously at first.

Instead, she spent two years studying psychology with a minor in kinesiology, splitting her time between Southern California and Arizona as her family relocated. When a break from school led her back to the workforce, she came across a massage therapy program built around night classes, which meant she could keep working during the day and train in the evenings.

She enrolled that fall and graduated from the Arizona School of Massage Therapy in 2003. More than two decades later, she’s still doing the work that first caught her attention as a teenager.

Specialized, Personalized Care

Katrina has spent her career focused on injury recovery, drawing on deep tissue, trigger point, structural, and myofascial techniques depending on what each person in front of her actually needs. Rather than specializing in one body area or one method, she treats every case individually, since, in her words, “nothing’s really cookie cutter.”

She’s worked alongside Dr. Thomas Tuzzolino at Elevate Chiropractic since September 2011, and she credits much of her growth as a therapist to the trust he places in her clinical judgment. He tells her what a patient needs, and she brings the technique and experience to get them there.

What to Expect From a Session

Every massage with Katrina is a full hour, giving her the time to work thoroughly through whatever issue brought a patient in on that day. Some sessions stay focused entirely on one problem area, while others evolve into more of a full-body treatment, depending on how a patient is feeling. She uses natural, hypoallergenic lotions free of nut oils, so patients with sensitivities can relax without worry. Throughout every session, patients remain comfortably covered by a sheet, with only the area being treated exposed.

Life Outside the Treatment Room

At the end of the day, Katrina heads home to Bruno and Dexter, her two dogs, who are always the first to greet her at the door. She spends her downtime reading (action and fantasy are her go-to genres) and listening to music, and she makes a point of taking time to decompress after a long day of caring for others.

Katrina Santillo | (480) 588-5111