Massage Bar Harbor Expands With Bar Harbor IV Therapy Collaboration.

Carrie Jones

Apr 26, 2026

BAR HARBOR—On a winter day back in January, Nikki Look walked into Ellsworth IV Infusion with a simple goal: she was on her own wellness journey and wanted to try the services herself.

She left with something else entirely — a business partnership.

“I went in, you know, and, and I immediately just said, is the owner here?” Look said, laughing at her own boldness. “She came out and she talked to me. From the second I met Lisa, I knew that I needed to do something with her.”

She just knew.

That spontaneous visit has turned into a new collaboration that brings IV infusion therapy to Bar Harbor this spring. It’s all part of Look’s growing vision of a year-round wellness hub designed for both residents and visitors.

Bar Harbor IV Infusion officially opens May 6 inside Massage Bar Harbor, marking a partnership between Look and nurse and business owner Lisa Gashlin.

According to its website, “IV Infusion Therapy is the fastest way to deliver vital fluids, electrolytes, and vitamins directly to your body’s cells. While oral supplements have to struggle through your digestive system-losing up to 80% of their potency along the way-our IV drips bypass the gut entirely. By delivering nutrients directly into the bloodstream, your body achieves 100% absorption and immediate rehydration.”

Together, they hope to create what Look calls a “comprehensive wellness destination.”

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From ER and ICU to integrative care

For Gashlin, the path to opening IV infusion clinics began with a vacation and a spider bite.

While traveling in Florida, she became suddenly and severely ill after feeling something on her shoulder and brushing it away. By nightfall, she had developed a high fever and felt worse than she ever had in her life.

Looking for relief, she tried IV nutritional therapy, which is a treatment that delivers fluids, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids directly into the bloodstream.

“I felt better before that afternoon,” she said. “And I thought, ‘We need one of these up home.’”

That moment led her to open Ellsworth IV Infusion and Wellness. Now she is expanding into Bar Harbor while simultaneously working toward becoming a nurse practitioner. It’s a lot. She can handle it.

Before launching her business, Gashlin spent years in high-intensity hospital settings, including cardiac care, the emergency room, and the ICU.

The shift to wellness care has been dramatic.

“It’s very rewarding doing this versus ER and ICU,” she said. “It’s the opposite experience. So, it’s very nice.”

Many of her clients, she says, arrive feeling unheard in traditional medical settings.

“I have patients come in and say, ‘My doctors don’t listen to me. They don’t hear what I say,’” Gashlin said. “‘They treat what I come in for, but they don’t listen to anything else.’”

Her goal is to help change that by focusing on whole-person wellness.

“Wellness balance is so big right now,” she said. “It’s not always focused on in regular clinical offices, and that’s my biggest thing. It really needs to be put out there. It’s so important for longevity and overall health.”

Gashlin hopes to expand her services further after graduating from nurse practitioner school next year, with plans to offer a small panel of integrative medicine patients alongside traditional care.

“We need to treat the whole person and not just the problem,” she said.

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A vision years in the making

For Look, the collaboration is part of a much longer journey.

Years ago, she remembers cleaning toilets at the Quality Inn and looking down Mount Desert Street, imagining a different future for herself.

“I used to say, I’m going to own something someday,” she said. “I didn’t know what it’s going to be.”

She had a dream, a vision, she explains, of helping people in an independent manner where she was the one who was able to create the business the way she envisioned.

Massage Bar Harbor began as a massage practice nearly 20 years ago and has steadily grown. While massage remains the “bread and butter” of the business, Look has spent recent years expanding services and stepping away from the massage table to focus on building something bigger.

The addition of IV infusion therapy felt like the missing piece.

“Since the first time I sat down and talked to Lisa, I thought, ‘This is it. This is the missing link,’” Look said.

She had a vision and that vision now includes sauna and cold plunge experiences, therapeutic massage, and IV infusions designed to work together as a full recovery and wellness circuit.

Look describes the concept as an “Acadia recovery experience.”

“It’s a 360-degree journey that treats the body from the outside in and the inside out,” she said. “It begins in our fire and ice garden where the heat of the sauna detoxifies the system before a cold plunge, provides an instant anti-inflammatory reset.”

From there, clients move to massage therapy and finish with IV hydration and nutrient replenishment.

“It’s a total body reset,” Look said. “It’s creating an Acadia recovery experience to match the intensity of our landscape.”

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Collaboration, not competition

Look was careful when she first approached Gashlin to make her intentions clear.

“I was upfront and I said, ‘I’m not on a fact-finding mission here,” Look said. “I do not want to do your business.’ I respect her so much in the community and what she’s created.”

Instead, she asked a simple question: Would you ever consider coming to Bar Harbor and doing something together?

Two weeks later, they met again. Soon after, they decided to move forward.

It happened really quickly, Gashlin said. “We collabed and it was a great conversation. And she’s a great mentor and leader, too.”

Both women describe the partnership as energizing and empowering.

“I find it very rewarding,” Gashlin said of owning a business. “It’s empowering as a woman. It’s rewarding, very rewarding.”

Look agrees.

“It’s really about being able to help people. You’re doing what you love, but in the manner of like how you envision it,” Look said. “So you can really build that vision and nobody’s telling you, ‘no, you can’t do it that way,’ you know?”

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A year-round focus

While wellness services often target visitors, both business owners emphasize that this expansion is meant to serve the year-round community as much as tourists.

They want to offer this year-round, Look said.

“This isn’t just for tourist season. This is something for our community,” she said.

That focus reflects a larger shift in Mount Desert Island’s economy, where business owners increasingly look for ways to balance seasonal tourism with services for residents.

For Gashlin and Look, the partnership feels like a natural fit.

For Look, the collaboration represents the culmination of years of imagining what could be possible.

“We’re building a wellness hub,” she said.

They are. And it all started with a vision while cleaning hotel toilets, a walk-in appointment, a bold question and, yes, a spider bite.

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE

Massage Bar Harbor’s website and its

Bar Harbor IV Infusion’s website and its Facebook page.

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