When your lovely fur pet is in pain it can be hard to know what to do or where to turn. Expensive medications are not always the answer – especially when you know that many times they hurt just as much as they are supposed to help. More and more pet parents are turning to non-invasive and natural therapies to help ease their pet’s pain and discomfort.
A method that might be worth looking into is the TTouch (pronounced ‘tee-touch’) method. This is a form of systematic and therapeutic touch that helps to stimulate healing and communication with the dog. Let’s hear more from Whole-Dog-Journal.com about this awesome option.
Helping Your Older Dog With Touch That Heals
The TTouch method was developed by Linda Tellington-Jones. The Canadian horsewoman had a long background in horse training and massage, but in 1970s, she began studying with Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, an Israeli physicist. Feldenkrais had developed a method of gentle manipulation of the human body, designed to improve pain and movement. He believed that by engaging non-habitual movement, you might be able to activate unused neural pathways to the brain and expand the potential to learn. Tellington-Jones’ study of the Feldenkrais method of “Awareness Through Movement” sparked a shift in her thinking about touch and movement in animals. (Read more)
This is not just petting! The TTouch looks to engage the parasympathetic nervous system. This engagement helps by relaxing the muscles and lowering the heart rate, blood pressure and getting those stress levels way down. When that stress is removed, often, that memory associated with the stress can be removed from the cells as well with a little encouragement.
TTouch has been studied to find out how it does what it does. At the Biofeedback Institute in Boulder, Colorado the method was shown to create altered brain waves. It could be seen that the specific touches were able to not only relax the animal’s body and brain, it also served to stimulate a more alert and cognitive state. This helped to switch out the previous pattern of behavior and replace it with a different perspective that was more focused on the ‘now’ and letting the dog move from a place of pain, to a place of comfort and healing. And the best part? No drugs or anything harmful for your beloved dog!