A massage therapy intake form that asks what the session is actually for

Built for a massage practice, not adapted from a medical one

Most massage therapy intake forms found online are one of two disappointments. Either they are a medical history questionnaire with the word massage typed at the top, asking about surgeries and medications and nothing about what the client actually wants from the session, or they are so thin they capture a name, a phone number and a signature. Neither helps you plan the hour ahead. This preset is written for how a massage practice actually works: what brings the client in, what they want to feel afterwards, how much pressure they like, where you should not go, and the health history that genuinely affects hands-on work. Edit it to your practice and take the PDF. There is no signup and no email wall.

• Built for HIPAA-compliant workflows

• Free to start — 50 patient actions each month

Goals, preferences and areas to avoid

This is the part generic client intake forms miss entirely, and it is what makes the difference between a good session and a guessed one. Ask what the client wants from the visit in their own words — relief from a specific ache, recovery after training, stress and sleep, or simply an hour of not being interrupted. Ask about pressure preference on a plain scale with words rather than numbers, since light and firm mean different things to different people. Ask which areas they would prefer you avoid, and give them somewhere to say why if they want to. Include a simple body map they can mark. Ask about previous massage experience and what they liked or did not. Five extra questions, answered before they are lying face down and reluctant to speak up, and the session starts from a much better place.

The health history that actually matters for hands-on work

The massage therapy health history form section covers what changes how you work rather than everything a physician might ask. Recent injuries, surgeries and their dates. Skin conditions, open wounds, bruising or recent tattoos. Circulatory conditions, blood pressure, blood clots or a history of them. Pregnancy and stage. Diabetes and neuropathy. Current medications, particularly blood thinners and muscle relaxants. Allergies and sensitivities, including oils and lotions, which is easily forgotten and immediately obvious when missed. Areas of chronic pain and any diagnosis the client chooses to share. All of it patient-reported and recorded as given — the form captures what the client tells you, and what to do with that information is your professional judgement.

Make it sound like your practice, then take the PDF

Rename the form, rewrite any question or piece of helper text, mark fields required or optional, and add, duplicate, reorder or remove sections. Tone matters in this setting as much as content — a clinical sports practice and a relaxation-focused studio ask the same things in noticeably different voices, and both are a few minutes of editing away. A default PDF is ready as soon as the page loads, and after any change a new PDF is generated from your current version so what you download is what you built. It is laid out for US Letter with clean page breaks and real writing space, and reset restores the original preset whenever you want.

A two-room studio, half an hour

A studio with two therapists starts from this preset. They add a pressure preference scale described in words rather than one to ten, after years of clients saying medium and meaning entirely different things. They add a question asking whether the client would like conversation during the session or prefers quiet, which sounds small and turns out to be the question clients most often thank them for. They expand the allergy line to name the specific oils they use. They remove a section on prior physical therapy they never referred to. The senior therapist reviews the health history questions and their insurer confirms the consent wording is acceptable. Half an hour of work, and every session now starts with the therapist already knowing what the hour is for.

Where your judgement takes over, and what comes next

The form gathers what the client reports and hands it to you. It does not screen for contraindications, flag anything as a reason not to treat, suggest techniques, or interpret a single answer, because that is the professional judgement of a licensed massage therapist who is about to be in the room. It also keeps three things deliberately distinct: what the client reported, any clinical assessment you make, and the separate legal consent they sign. Have a licensed therapist review the health history section for your modality, and your attorney or insurer review consent, cancellation and scope of practice wording, which varies by state and licence. DocRepute is HIPAA-focused and built for HIPAA-compliant workflows, and as this is a public tool, build the blank form here rather than entering real client details. When paper starts costing you time between appointments, the same preset drives DocRepute digital patient intake.