Animal physio

There’s life in the old dog yet!

Elderly animals are Irmela’s principal clients, although her treatments, just like those for people, are invaluable for animals of any age that have suffered trauma or accidents and need gentle exercise to recover. One of the mornings we visited, we met her current ‘star’ Lennox (shortened to ‘Lenny’) – a 10-year-old Boxer with two bad knees, a dicky back and hereditary arthritis. “To be honest, we thought Lenny was a gonner before we came to Irmela” owners Tony and Val told us. “He could barely move he was in that much pain. We thought we were taking him to the vet for the last time – and then we were told about Irmela”.

Irmela works out of a little wooden house, converted into an animal physiotherapy clinic. She has a nice, comfy, wide, low bed – an infrared light, a TENS machine (standing for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation), lasers (for treating wounds), an electrical machine (for treating tendons), heated pads, rolled-up towels, a nice patch of grass outside (“excellent for gentle exercise”), a gravelled area (again, for dogs who need to move stiff or injured limbs and stretch those paws), and a free-standing pool for hydrotherapy. On the clinic walls are diagrams of canine and equine musculature, and here and there, little malleable models of horses and dogs.

“I’ve always loved animals,” Irmela gives us a synopsis of her career. “And my ambition was always to be an animal nurse, not a vet – but then I came to this stage where I wanted a new possibility. Something of substance. I’d heard about animal physiotherapy, I looked into it – and discovered I could take a distance-learning course with an intensive practical in Germany during my annual holidays. It sounded perfect – and something that simply wasn’t available here.

“I qualified last June and have been practising since. Of course, to begin with, it will be slow – but I am introducing myself to all the local vets, and hope they will like to work with me. You could say it was a form of competition, but it really isn’t. This is a level of care that vets simply don’t have the time to give, and it’s a way of giving animals back a quality of life they’ve been missing – naturally!”

The ‘natural’ part was a crucial deciding factor in Tony and Val’s case. Lenny limped home from the vets that last time, but the price was a whopping €4 a day in expensive medication.

“We really couldn’t afford it, and without the pills, Lenny would have been back to square one”, Val explained.

Enter Irmela, on the vet’s recommendation, and Lenny’s woeful expression changed almost overnight.

“The first time I saw him, I really worked on his back, using heated pads, the TENS machine, massage. I found the skin round his shoulder blades was very ‘stuck’, so bit by bit, I loosened the layers of fascias to help him move”, Irmela explains.

After that first treatment, lasting in all an hour and a half, Lenny went home – and “slept for two days” (a normal side-effect of this type of physio).

Two further treatments later and his owners were delighted to find him “racing round like a puppy”.

“He’s never looked back! It’s been an absolute miracle!” Smiles Tony.

Once ‘balanced’, Lenny’s initial twice-weekly treatments have become weekly – and he’s completely off the pills!

“He can’t wait to get in the car now… he always thinks we’re coming here”, laughs Val.

Another patient, Chouriço – a rotund Spitz-cross had similar age-related problems. A fine figure of an ‘old boy’, he’d be doing perfectly one minute, and then collapse in agony another – upsetting his owner Andrea, particularly as by the time she got him to the vet’s, he’d invariably have ‘recovered’, and so no solution seemed in sight.

We found him, literally glowing on the couch, on his second visit. Since the first visit, a few days before, there’d been no recurrence of his paralysis attacks.

“What I can never do is ‘promise’ things”, Irmela stresses. “Every animal is different, there are many different problems. For example, this afternoon, I am getting a little puppy with a badly injured front leg. She was found like that. We don’t know how it happened. I really don’t know if I can help her. I will give her three sessions, and then we have to reevaluate.”

The puppy, Cindy, is a delightful little character that lopes around like a kangaroo; her bad leg apparently devoid of all feeling hangs useless and is developing a stress-injury because it is dragged along the ground. Irmela is treating her tendons with electrical stimulation, to try and keep Cindy’s muscles from atrophying. As the electrical impulses are given, you can see the muscles responding, but the prognosis still isn’t good.

“If only we knew the extent of the damage internally”, Irmela sighs – but that would require an expensive MRI, which Cindy’s rescuers cannot afford.

Days later, we hear Cindy has been in the pool for some hydrotherapy and that the muscles in the shoulder are showing signs of working…

Irmela’s training has taught her how to help horses, too. “It’s exhausting! Treatments take around two hours and involve so much work and energy, but it’s amazing to see their reactions. They really love it, and can benefit so much from this kind of treatment.”

Irmela’s plan is to keep adding to her newfound experience, and take further courses over the coming years, to perfect her expertise.

“This is a huge area that can really help animals, and their owners, and bring a definite all-round improvement to quality of life.”

For more information, contact Irmela direct via www.animalphysio.eu tel: 965211996, or email: Email