Services
Laser:
Laser therapy uses infrared light to stimulate cellular activity and increase the body’s rate of healing. It also has an analgesic (pain relief) and a gentle warming effect on the tissues. Laser therapy is painless and well tolerated by patients. it is effective in 3 different ways: pain relief, reduces inflammation, and stimulates the body's own healing mechanisms.
After treatment a healing process is initiated that continues to actively reduce inflammation for up to 24 hours. This therapy can be effective in treating both acute pain and inflammation, chronic conditions and post-operative pain.
Typically even long standing conditions can show improvement after 3 to 5 sessions. Laser is also useful in the treatment of open or non healing wounds.
Therapeutic Ultrasound:
Ultrasound uses low frequency sound waves to stimulate tissue healing. It can be used for heating effects in deep tissues as well as to break down adhesions and scar tissues particularly in tendons. Ultrasound is used to stimulate healing of collagen. Soft tissues with a high collagen content will respond well to ultrasound treatment. Common conditions treated with ultrasound include tendon injury, ligament injury and muscle injury.
Ultrasound will also stimulate circulation by increasing the blood supply to the injured area, helping to maximise the healing process.
Therapeutic Exercises:
A program of therapeutic exercises performed both in the clinic and at home is an integral part of the rehabilitation program.
This sort of physiotherapy for animals is more challenging than with people as we can not explain to them what we want then to do. We have a wide variety of exercises that can be used to target movement at different muscle, tendons or joints and can be adapted to the individual capabilities of your pet.
Doing these exercises at home enables you to be involved in your animals recovery and will speed up the rehabilitation process considerably. Lead walking is often an essential part of the recovery process and we can assist with preventing pulling and enabling the walking to be a valuable part of therapy rather than a battle.
Therapeutic exercises can be used to encourage weight bearing on a limb, improve active joint motion and to build power, strength and speed. They can be used to help proprioception (the awareness of where the body is in space) and balance ( the body’s ability to maintain equilibrium while standing or moving over different ground conditions). Simple massage techniques or stretching may be demonstrated to you to help manage pain and recovery from injury.
I will assess your dog and develop a unique program for your pet and it will be adjusted as we go through the rehabilitation process. If a particular exercise is difficult to do we can design an alternative. We can assist with training your dog to complete the exercises - there are many ways to teach the same thing - sometimes this may be as simple as training a dog to sit correctly, sometimes training methods such as clicker training are used.
Please contact us if you struggle with a particular exercise - we are here to help.