The Tenth District upheld the state medical board’s revocation of a massage therapist’s license.

The Tenth District upheld the state medical board’s revocation of a massage therapist’s license.

An Ohio appeals court found the state properly revoked the license of a massage therapist, who insisted she was trained at a defunct California school despite not being able to describe the school, the city where it was located, or identify any of the instructors of classes she claimed to have taken.

The Tenth District Court of Appeals ruled this week that the State Medical Board of Ohio provided sufficient evidence to permanently revoke the license of Liumei Liu of Ottawa, Ohio. With Liu’s revocation upheld, the state medical board has now revoked the licenses of all Ohio massage therapists who indicated they were trained at the Lincoln Institute of Body Therapy in Orange County, California.

Liu received a license to practice massage therapy in 2018 in Ohio. She passed a federal massage and bodywork licensing examination (MBLex) in 2015. The Tenth District’s opinion stated that the medical board had no reason to doubt Liu’s educational credentials, which indicated she graduated from the Lincoln Institute in 2016. However, when reviewing the application of another therapist, the board became suspicious of the Lincoln Institute’s practices.

A board investigator discovered the Lincoln Institute was “permanently closed” in 2017, but its students could take the MBLex until July 2017. The California Massage Therapy Council told the Ohio investigator it “un-approved” the institute for several reasons, including issuing fraudulent documents and creating fake attendance records.

Massage Therapist Can’t Recall Educational Training Details
Liu is a native of China who first came to the United States in 2015 when she was 51 years old. She lived in English-speaking Guam for 10 years before coming to the United States, and noted that she owned her own relaxation massage studio in Guam. Liu was operating a massage business in Ottawa when the medical board questioned her in 2022 as part of its investigation into Lincoln Institute graduates.

Liu appeared in Columbus for a deposition conducted by a board attorney. Liu indicated she spoke some English, and the board retained an interpreter to translate the questions and responses.
When asked details about her training, Liu repeatedly answered “I don’t know” to several questions, including the city where the Lincoln Institute was supposedly located. She could not describe the buildings, name any classmates, identify her transcript, or identify any of her instructors from photographs.

When asked how she passed the MBLex, a written exam, if she could not read English, she explained that an instructor at the institute coached her on the answers, and she memorized all the questions and answers on the multiple-choice exam.

After the deposition, the board notified Liu that it would take disciplinary action against her. The board set a hearing for April 2023. Liu did not attend the hearing; instead, she hired an attorney to represent her and provided a written statement.

In her statement, she claimed the interpreter at her deposition spoke too fast and she didn’t understand the questions, which is why she repeatedly stated she didn’t know or couldn’t answer them. The result was that the transcript of the hearing was inaccurate, she claimed.

At the board hearing, the board investigators presented information from the national organization that administers the MBLex, which stated that Liu’s submission indicated she trained somewhere other than the Lincoln Institute. The investigators indicated Liu’s application to the Ohio board included a certificate of education purportedly signed by the director of the Lincoln Institute. Liu submitted three transcripts from the Lincoln Institute, each with different hours completed and different dates when the training took place.

The board concluded she presented false information to obtain a license in Ohio, and the board permanently revoked it in March 2024.

Therapist Contests License Revocation
Liu appealed the revocation to the Franklin County Common Pleas Court. In July 2024, the trial court affirmed the board’s decision. The court noted that at no time during the deposition did Liu raise concerns about the interpretation of the questions and her ability to respond.

Liu appealed the trial court’s decision to the Tenth District.

Writing for the Tenth District, Judge Laurel Beatty Blunt stated a common pleas court is required to affirm an order of the state medical board if it is supported by “reliable, probative, and substantial evidence.” An appeals court has an even more limited role and can only determine if the trial court abused its discretion when deciding the case, she wrote.

The opinion stated the appellate court believes beyond dispute that there was false information in Liu’s license application. The court found that Liu didn’t provide any credible evidence to explain the discrepancies between the information in her application and her responses at her deposition.

“And Ms. Liu does not dispute that her application materials contained numerous inaccurate statements; instead, she insists that any mistakes were innocent. But because the intent to mislead may be – and indeed frequently must be – inferred from the surrounding facts, in the absence of any other explanation, it was with the Board’s authority to adopt the hearing officer’s view of the evidence,” the opinion stated.

The Tenth District stated it couldn’t find that the trial court abused its discretion by “rejecting Ms. Liu’s bare statement that she was blameless.”

Judges Kristin Boggs and David J. Leland joined Judge Beatty Blunt’s opinion.

Liu v. State Med. Bd. of Ohio, 2025-Ohio-2205.

Please note: Opinion summaries are prepared by the Office of Public Information for the general public and news media. Opinion summaries are not prepared for every opinion, but only for noteworthy cases. Opinion summaries are not to be considered as official headnotes or syllabi of court opinions. The full text of this and other court opinions are available online.

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