Intro 0:00
In today's podcast, you are going to walk away with so many things that you can do to keep your pet healthier, happier, and live longer with an amazing life. Stuff that you can do at home. Dr. Laurie McCauley is going to give you so much information. Stay tuned.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Hello, and welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Judy Morgan. My guest today, Dr. Laurie McCauley, is a pioneer in rehab therapy for our pets. She designed the first underwater treadmill for dogs. She founded the first rehab center, and she has educated 1000s of veterinary professionals. So, yay, we're educating more veterinarians to do holistic things. So, Dr. Laurie, thank you so much for agreeing to come educate everyone today.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 0:57
Thanks for having me. It's awesome. I love to teach people, I love to help people help pets.
Dr. Judy Morgan 1:02
That's kind of what we're all here for. It's, it really is just the love of our animals and helping have them have the best life that they possibly can. So we spent some time together during the Naturally Healthy Pets Experience in Orlando, and you were talking to me, I think it was during the cocktail reception, and you brought this little gadget called a tuning fork, which I'm familiar with, because my sister uses them in her rehab practice for both people and pets, but you walked up and you said, Oh, you have all this tension in your shoulders. I think I need to fix that for you. And I just went, okay, and gave you permission. And then, about 20 minutes later, I was walking around, going, "Wow, that was the coolest thing ever. And so this is just one of many things that you've been using in your rehab work, that and also that you teach other veterinarians, so we're definitely going to talk about that, demonstrate that a little bit today, and we have our dear friends Pookie and Myra, who have agreed to help, so we'll get to see a little bit of live demo, we'll see if they melt, but tell us a little bit about your background in rehab, how you got started in that, and for all holistic people, what I find is there was something that happened somewhere along the way where they just went, this is what I was meant to do. So, what was your aha moment? How did this start?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 2:34
So, literally, I did general practice for six years, and I was bored. Right, there's only so much
Dr. Judy Morgan 2:41
I did 10, and I was bored.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 2:43
Yep so only so much diarrhea and kidney failure, and all of that stuff. And I decided I was going to learn acupuncture, and I'm like, okay. And my boss was like, I don't believe in it, I don't, I won't give you the time off, I won't pay for it, and if you do it, I won't refer to you, which was like major line in the sand, and I'm like, okay, what do I do? I feel like this calling, and then I fell down the stairs at 3o'clock in the morning, putting my dogs out, and of course, of course, right?
Dr. Judy Morgan 3:13
Usually you trip over the dog, yeah, exactly.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 3:16
Chiropractor couldn't fix me, so I ended up going to an orthopedic guy who sent me to a physical therapist, and I went, oh my god, this is amazing. This is exactly what I want to do for dogs. I could use this to do that, and that to do that. And I said, I'm going to take a course, and there was no courses, so I spent, I don't know, several months doing research, and there was one guy I don't know if you remember, Alameda East, which is from Emergency Vets, way, way, way long ago. Spent a couple months out there. We did some research. He had a physical therapist, a human physical therapist on staff, and that was the only body doing anything like that.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 3:53
And so I designed the first underwater treadmill. I came back, I took the acupuncture course, I left my old job, and rehab was born, and then I had this underwater treadmill, and I was just starting, and they had the first international conference for sports medicine, which was mostly what it was, sports medicine and physical rehabilitation, and I brought the, I brought a poster for the underwater treadmill, and had videos of dogs that couldn't walk, and then you stimulate their tail in a certain way, and they start taking steps, and it's like neuromuscular reeducation, and people are like, oh my god, that's amazing. And from there, I mean, now they sell more underwater treadmills for animals than they do for humans and horses, which is where it started, and I taught the certification course for 14 years, teaching vets, pet techs, and PTs. I've lectured all over the world. I love, love, love what I do. My motto, my what drives me is empowering people, optimizing pets. I want to teach as many people. I, of course, not you, but I am getting older, and at some point I won't be able to be on the floor working with the dogs all day, so I want to teach as many people as I can what I do, so that they can help the dogs.
Dr. Judy Morgan 5:11
Yeah, absolutely, and that really is, I mean, that's that's why we spend so much time educating and empowering pet parents, educating and empowering healers, so that we can have this coalition where everyone is just basically for the pets. And how can we help them have their best life, and you know, spend that life being active and having just a really long health span, and not, you know, year, I think it unfortunately, and I see it on social media all the time. Well, he's old, you know, you know, he just doesn't exercise so much because he's getting older. He sleeps a lot because he's older,
Dr. Judy Morgan 5:59
it's not a disease, and I can tell you, so my personal story with it. Unfortunately, it revolves around a traditional medicine, but I had a nine year old Doberman, and he was a big Doberman, and so at nine my kids were young, and at nine he was just kind of a lump who slept under the coffee table or in the corner most of the time, and I was just like, okay, he's just same thing, I wasn't into holistics yet, and I was just like, ah, he's getting old, he's a nine year old big dog, and then Rimadyl hit the market, and I thought, well, he must have some arthritis, because he's a big old dog, and I gave him Rimadyl, and two days later he was out jumping fences in the backfield, and I was like, oh, somebody gets hurt. You were painful. Sadly, the Rimadyl was his ultimate demise, because we didn't know what we now know about the dangers of NSAIDs and all the other medications that I now cringe about, you know. And that dog was sent to me to teach me that.
Dr. Judy Morgan 6:58
they all come to teach us something, but it opened my eyes to the fact that we have so many animals with chronic pain, and they don't talk, so they can't tell us, and we're, we're just all under that myth of he's just old.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 7:18
Well, I think they do talk, their talking is them not moving
Dr Judy Morgan 7:21
exactly, and I think so many people don't realize Ed Bassingthwaighte from Australia, his big platform is hidden pain, you know, and how many of our animals have hidden pain, and we just don't realize it.
Dr. Judy Morgan 7:40
so, so this is great, because what you're doing is helping our animals overcome this, and giving therapists and veterinarians the tools to work with, and these are non-invasive tools,
Dr. Judy Morgan 7:55
so we know the underwater treadmill is just, it's a physical therapy tool, and so having that buoyancy helps the animals be able to move without stressing those joints,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 8:08
right? So, if the dogs are at like hock level of water, it takes about 9% of their body weight off, and by the time it gets up to the point of their shoulders, it takes about 30% of their body weight off, so it takes weight off, and the reason is because then the water, as it comes up, the chest goes in. But if you go too much above that, then they're stilted, right, because then it's like if you're in water up to here, you do this and then you take smaller steps.
Dr. Judy Morgan 8:35
So there's a lot of science behind the underwater treadmill, and do you use in physical therapy practice? Do you use non water like dry land treadmills?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 8:48
Absolutely. We, I'm a huge believer in multimodal therapy, so better living through chemistry when needed, and my hands, the tuning forks, acupuncture, laser, shockwave, there's so many different modalities that help our pets without the drugs, so everything has benefits, everything can have negativity if, if you don't have the right case selection, but having that, there's so much we can do, and there's so much that pet parents can do at home, huge,
Dr. Judy Morgan 9:23
exactly. And you know, I think that a lot of times people feel, feel like they have no options if they can't afford to go to physical therapy three times a week, or they have an animal that they can't get in the car to get them there, and we also had these animals who are just absolutely frightened to death, and so they're not good candidates to be walking into somewhere three days a week to have some sort of therapy done, they're afraid of other people and strange places, so anything we can do to empower those pet parents at home, I used to love when people would come in for their animals for a consultation, we'd do acupuncture, and I'd do chiropractic on them, but I was always giving the clients some sort of homework.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 10:08
Absolutely,
Dr. Judy Morgan 10:09
you know, hands on. It's like, okay, I want you to just run your hand down their back, feel that big knot right there. When you come back next week, I want that big knot to be gone, and here is how you're going to do it. Here's, you know, where you want to place your hands, what level of pressure you want to use, the motions that you want to make. Just giving people, even you know, passive range of motion, anything that we can empower those pet parents to be actively and proactively involved in that care. I think it's so critical,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 10:41
huge, absolutely huge,
Dr. Judy Morgan 10:43
absolutely huge. So one of the things that you talk about is in your teachings is fascia. and it's my sister's in PT and does craniosacral work, and so she's talking about fascia all the time, and it seems to be this nebulous thing that people are like, what the heck are you talking about? So, let's get down and dirty. Describe what that is and how it works in the body.
Dr. Laurie McCauley
Absolutely, so fascia is actually bigger than skin, right? We talk about skin, used to talk about skin being the biggest organ in the body. Fascia is even more, because fascia is under the skin, so like you talk about cranial sacral, right, that's between the skull and the skin of the head, so you're going to have restrictions there. But fascia is around every nerve, it's around every blood vessel, it's around every lymph vessel, so it can, when it's what I call sticky icky, when it gets congealed, it literally constricts blood vessels and lymph vessels, so you can have swelling, you can have decreased perfusion, or decreased blood flow to the area. You can have pain from the nerves literally being squeezed. Fascia is around every muscle cell, so you can have cramps, you can have trigger points related to the fascia. It's around the tendons and ligaments, it's around the joints. It, they have electron microscopy, so like major ability to see down into things to show that it goes into every cell and touches every nucleus, right? Every cell in the body is touched by fascia, and it is all connected. It's not like there's fascia here and fascia here, like bones that are connected by joint capsules, literally it's one big sheet, and then there are lines of it where it's actually denser, which is why, like, some people may be leaned over or they're shifted to the side because their fascial lines are constricted and it pulls them so they can stretch out of it, but their body's like, "Oh, my nerves say I'm supposed to be this way, and then you fix the fascia, and immediately they're up right, and we see that with the dogs as well. They may be roachy, they may be lordotic, they may be lame, they have all kinds of issues, they may not be able to flex and extend their joints, and you fix it, and literally within minutes it's better, it's amazing,
Dr. Judy Morgan 13:04
it really is. And it's funny when I first.. so the first thing that I learned was chiropractic, before I learned acupuncture and everything else, and it was so amazing to me that that's what started my holistic journey, and because I was like, that was so cool, what else is out there?
Dr. Judy Morgan 13:17
but we had this, the first pony I bought for my kids, and we bought him. He had come through an auction, and we bought him from a dealer. Really, not the way to buy horses, folks. So, don't pay attention to what I did. But we bought this pony, and he had been a driving pony. So, when they're driving exactly, they're set with the head harness into a certain position, and that's where their head is supposed to be, and that's how they're supposed to move. Well, of course, we made it into a riding pony, and so when they're driving, they are only allowed to walk and trot. So to teach them to canter was like this: he was like, 'I'm not supposed to do that, I'm not supposed to do that. And after, so we'd had him for a couple of years, and I took chiropractic, and I said, well, you know, I'm just playing with the stuff. I don't know how it works, and so I went out, and I did an adjustment on the pony, and all of a sudden his head came up, and he started looking around, and it was one of those light bulb moments where I said, oh my gosh, this pony's never been able to raise his head above, you know this straight driving position, and all of a sudden I opened up his world, and he's looking around like, oh my gosh, there's birds in the sky, there's all these other things that I was never able to see, and it was one of those huge aha moments for me, of oh my gosh, and so you know now I'm doing it in my practice, I had a dog who had a horrible lick granuloma, and same thing, I did chiropractic on him. I'm like, well, you know, I have this theory, and I've read it some other places, that the licking is just nerve tingling, like your foot's asleep. And I said, so let's see what happens if we adjust this dog. It was a front leg, there's probably something in his neck. I adjusted him, the. Owner came back the next week, and I said, so how'd the week go? And he said, oh, you created a monster. I said, what do you mean? And he said, I didn't realize it before, but my dog couldn't hold his head up and look up, and so after you adjusted him, he could now look up. He saw birds in the sky, same as my horse, and all of a sudden this dog is flying through the air, leaping up and down, trying to catch birds. because he didn't realize they were up there,
Dr Judy Morgan 15:27
And you know, so.. and all that is what you're talking about. It's fascial restrictions, you know. The people that you see, we.. we used to show horses, and there was this one horse show mom who walked with, you know, one whole side of her body caved in, and she had this horrible hobble, and she was kind of overweight, and you could tell she was really painful, and you know, year after year, I was just like, oh my god, this poor woman needs help, like, why doesn't she go get help, you know, but people don't want to hear it from the veterinarian, like, really, she go get adjusted, and you know, so the following year I'm seeing her at the horse shows, and she's upright and she's lost weight and she looks great and I'm like, what did you do, you look like a new person. She said, I went to a chiropractor.
Dr. Judy Morgan 16:09
that's the thing I was saying for like three years, but okay, right? And it was just, it was amazing to see her body totally transform once those restrictions were removed.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 16:19
It's huge, it's huge,
Dr. Judy Morgan 16:21
so really cool stuff. So, what are your best methods that you.. I mean, obviously chiropractic, because we just shared that, but what other methods do you use in practice to get rid of all those fascial restrictions that you know most of us, our animals, are running around with, and we're running around with, and we don't know?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 16:38
So, literally, I call it chiropractic because that's what insurance companies will reimburse for, and I will say maybe I do some chiropractic, but I do cranial sacral, myofascial release, osteopathy, Bowen, sacral occipital technique. There's just so many things out there, and I love to learn,
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:04
and is all of this hands on?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 17:05
That's all hands on. and then if that doesn't work, then I can either use the laser or the tuning forks, which are just amazing as well.
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:15
So, so many options,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 17:17
so many options, many options,
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:18
and the problem is not all veterinarians have all these tools. I will say that cold laser is becoming really commonplace.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 17:28
I honestly believe that as the price of veterinary medicine goes up, up, up, up, up, that more smart pet owners will learn how to use laser appropriately and purchase units that are not just garbage from China, right? And learn how to do it well at home, because you can.
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:52
Yeah, I think with the price of the lasers coming down, and the quality, the quality for the price is starting to come together. Yes, red light therapy is another huge one that is really easy for pet parents to apply at home. I've recently gotten into that with my own, so I think we have a lot of tools that can be used at home. Okay, we need to take a break to hear from our sponsors. When we come back, we're going to talk about some of these other tools that Dr. Laurie has. Really interested in tuning forks, because, like I said, that was used on me, coolest thing. So we're going to talk about that, and how it works, and how you could possibly use this at home for your pets as well. Stay tuned.
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Dr. Judy Morgan
Welcome back, you're listening to the Naturally Healthy Pets Podcast. My guest today, Dr. Laurie McCauley, is one of the physical therapy gurus in veterinary medicine, and we are so appreciative for all the work that you do and all the teaching that you do for veterinarians, veterinary students, and pet owners. So, so far we've learned what fascia is and how it can really ruin our lives, but we can also fix it and make it, make it our friend, because so we talked about how it can constrict and really cause all these problems. What is the real function of fascia? Like, why do we have it if it causes all these problems?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 21:52
Great, let's.. I'm gonna go back for one second. So, to describe fascia, if you think about, you get a turkey for Thanksgiving and you take your hand, and you want to put your herbs between the skin and the meat, you're going through what we call soft fascia, or loose fascia. So, you now you have a feel of it, now you think of it, right? The other kind is dense fascia, so now you're cutting into a steak, and you have that grizzle that's not fat, but it's kind of holding all those muscle fibers together, that's your dense fascia. So now you have a visual and maybe a taste for this kind of stuff. And then, and I'm sorry, I forgot what your question was. I was so excited.
Dr Judy Morgan 22:33
The function of fascia
Dr. Laurie McCauley 22:34
the function of fascia is to hold everything together, and it has cells in there that communicate, and it is everything where your cells aren't, so in other words, fluid, so we talk about interstitial fluid, goes through the fascia. So, fun fact, kind of is that cancer metastasizes by having cells break off and going through the body and getting stuck somewhere and not being able to move, and so they grow right, can't be attached by the lymphatic system, by our immune system, and being taken away. And they did a study in rodents and showed that by stretching the rats, they actually have, they had significantly less metastasis.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 23:20
because that fluid can flow, you don't get that sticky, icky congealing of that fascia causing that restricting and allowing those - I'm supposing, right, because it's not fully in research - those cells to get taken away by the immune system, and it's fascia is everything around everything to hold it together and communicate. There's cells in there that literally, once they're stimulated, it's a wave of information that goes to other cells to tell them what to do
Dr. Judy Morgan 23:53
Okay, so an important function,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 23:55
super important,
Dr. Judy Morgan 23:56
important part of the body. now they know that it's a bigger organ than the skin, so boy, that just busted a lot of vet school exam questions. So now when they get it wrong, it's your fault, because we know what the testing people want anyway.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 24:16
Oh, can I tell you one more thing? We talked about acupuncture just a little bit. There are studies now that show that when you stick the needle in and turn it, one of the things that's happening is it's twisting the fascia, which is why going clockwise versus counterclockwise can have a different effect, because it's how you're twisting and pulling the fascia.
Dr. Judy Morgan 24:33
Interesting. Yeah, I mean that makes perfect sense, because there's no way you're going to stick an acupuncture needle in without going through fascia,And hitting nerves and everything else, so
Dr. Laurie McCauley 24:42
the fascia attaches to the needle and spins with it.
Dr. Judy Morgan 24:45
Yeah, and that is something that you know, for people who have had acupuncture done on their dogs, you may see the veterinarian performing it, twist those needles one direction or the other, and there's a whole science behind which direction you twist and what. You're trying to do so, another cool fun fact. So, one of the things that we want to talk about, we definitely want to talk about tuning forks. But first of all, I got to put this in order. Describe how a tuning fork works, and then we're going to talk about how you figure out where to use the tuning fork,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 25:23
okay! So tuning fork is two tines coming down, and then it comes down in one stalk that we hold as a pencil, and when you activate it, so I will activate it on my palm, the there's energy that comes up at the top, but because you have the weights, it pushes the energy down into the stock. So, if you have a tuning fork without the weights, there's very little happening at the bottom. Most of it is at the top. So, we use it for treating the biofield, which is a whole nother topic
Dr. Laurie McCauley 25:58
When we're using it for tissue, we activate the tuning fork, and then I have on this one is amethyst on the bottom, so this becomes
Dr. Judy Morgan 26:11
So we've got gut stone and gem therapy in here as well.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 26:13
It becomes a diagnostic tool as well as a therapeutic tool, so if I activate it and slide it on skin where there's no fascial restrictions, it slides and glides. If I do it, I'll show you over my thoracic duct. I didn't clear it, so I could show you. You can see that it grabs that tells me there's a fascial restriction. How did I know it was going to be that way over my thoracic duct? Because anytime we have inflammation in the lymphatic system, it goes the liquid, the problem stuff, all the nasty, icky, sticky stuff goes into the lymph nodes and goes through the lymph ducts, and it all comes to the cisterna chili, and then it comes out the left side of your body is the thoracic duct, which actually cool fun fact: before you're born, your lymphatics are left and right. The moment you're born, a whole bunch of lymph ducts shut off, so the terminal duct on the right only covers the right half of the head, the right arm, and the right part of the chest, and the right leg, and all of that comes through. So, 75% of the body comes through the thoracic duct, so in vet school we only learn lymph comes through the thoracic duct, but 25% of the body comes through the terminal duct, and if you think about the lymphatic system like a hose, if you have your handle on the hose and you shut it off, nothing flows, or it may drip, but if you clear that, if you open that up, then, and certainly, then if you open up the lymph nodes, right, which are little small blockers, then fluid can flow through, and you can open up that whole lymphatic system, and that is the story of how I learned about this, because Patrice Corticus took an ankle that my PT, who's a really good PT, said would take a year to a year and a half for that fluid to go away, and she treated me, and within 72 hours, 80% of the swelling was gone, and within a couple weeks, the rest of the swelling was gone, and I'm like, there's science behind it, I want to know it, I want to figure it out, and we're going to learn about this and teach people about it,
Dr. Judy Morgan 28:18
very cool, so for our pets, so the tuning fork on people, you know, you can slide it against the skin. does the hair interfere?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 28:29
Not at all. It can be an akita, it can be a lab. We can activate the tuning fork and put it and go down their body, and it's amazing, because just like it did over my thoracic duct, you'll get to a point, usually where there's a trigger point, and it will be like you're sitting in peanut butter, it doesn't slide, and then you just turn it up, and literally 20 or 30 seconds that trigger point will go away. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but most of the time that's good.
Dr. Judy Morgan 28:58
Okay, so that brings us to our next question, What is a trigger point, and if we don't have a tuning fork, how do we find them?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 29:04
Oh, great question. Great question. So every muscle should stretch a certain amount, right? So things like taking the dog's back foot and keeping their back straight, super important, bringing it up to either point to or touch their elbow is normal. If there isn't, if it isn't, if it can't do that, then we know there's something either going on with the hamstrings, the gluteal muscles, or the back muscles, and we can palpate those and say, where is it tight? And if it's tight, you fix it, and it can be with a tuning fork, it can be with laser, it can be with your hands doing manual therapy, massage techniques, but remember, massage works mostly with the muscle. There's 10 times more nerve endings in fascia than there is in muscle. So, if you, it takes a lot more work to get rid of muscle issues if you work with the muscle directly. If you work with the fascia, remember, fascia is around every muscle cell. You release that, and the muscle just slides and stretches, and again, it can be 10, it can be 20 or 30 seconds, and we can take that dog, and they can stretch.
Dr. Judy Morgan 30:10
So, the best ways for somebody to do this at home, if they're, you know, yes, they can do it with massage. So, absolutely no tools, no money invested, other than learning some massage. Yep, and you know what? Frankly, you don't have to learn a ton of massage if you feel this real tight area, this lump in the back. You know, you run your hands down, you go, oh my gosh, there's like this knot in the muscle. It's like, ah, maybe I should work on that a little. Maybe I'll just rub a little bit there, maybe I'll put a little warm compress on there, and then I'll rub that area and see if we can get that to go away, but if someone had tuning forks or cold laser that they or red light therapy that they could use at home, that's just going to speed up the process.
Dr. Judy Morgan 30:55
So can we do damage using tuning forks or massage or red light or laser at home.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 31:03
Yes, so you have to know when to use it and when not to use it, right? And learning about it is super important. So things like cancer, right? We don't want to increase blood flow to an area that has cancer, because we don't want to feed the cancer. So anytime there's a bump, if you're not sure if it's muscle or a lump, because I don't wanna say cancer, because it can be a non-cancerous lump, talk to your vet, right? Always find out what it is before you try to get rid of it. If it is in the muscle and you're definitely sure it's in the muscle, go ahead and treat it. If it doesn't go away. Talk to your vet, right, because they can figure it out, even if they have to stick a needle in it and pull some cells out, so that then they can put it on a slide and go, oh, it's just fat, or oh, this is a mast cell, this is bad, or just inflammation, right? But they can find out for you,
Dr. Judy Morgan 31:58
could be lots of different things. So do the tuning forks come in different frequencies, sizes, strengths?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 32:04
Yep. So, 128 is the frequency of fascia, so that is the immediate go-to. They make one that's specific for bone, and it doesn't come with weights.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 32:16
so I'm a scientist at heart, and I have arthritis in my hands, so I played for a while with the one for bone and found out it did not get rid of the arthritis in bone in my hands. I actually had a better success with the 128 but with lapis lazuli, which is a stone specific for scar tissue as well as other things, and it literally by activating the tuning fork and putting it on the areas where I have arthritis, probably cut it in about half.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 32:51
yeah, which increased motion in my joints,
Dr. Judy Morgan 32:55
which so many of our dogs, and frankly, so many of our cats - cats just hide it much better. the statistics for how many cats aren't they cute? For statistics for cats over 10 years of age that we're just x-raying for something else,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 33:12
arthritis.
Dr. Judy Morgan 33:13
It's like 80% of them have arthritic joints, and they just keep doing their thing. so cats truly are like the heroes of hidden pain, like, they're just not going to tell anybody anything,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 33:28
right? And they are super sensitive. I do want to go back, because you asked me contraindications. , fractures, right, because it makes the bones vibrate, at different spaces, and can be extremely painful, so I, that's important for people to understand. Don't put it over a fracture that's not healed.
Dr. Judy Morgan 33:47
So, yeah, if you've got an animal that's healing from a broken TPLO
Dr. Judy Morgan 33:51
Let's wait until it's completely healed before we start doing stuff.
Dr. Judy Morgan 33:54
Now, so let's say somebody's got, you know, a Rottweiler that had TPLO surgery, so we don't want to use this over that joint, for sure, but we also know that after going through that surgery and hobbling around for weeks and weeks, this animal's going to have a lot of back problems. We're going to have all kinds of trigger points and muscle knots and all kinds of things going on. Could it be used on the back area, while that leg's healing?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 34:24
so usually you get trigger points or excessive tightening of muscles from overuse or abnormal use. So a great way to use a tuning fork would be the opposite leg, so say it was the left rear leg, the right rear leg from being overused is going to have trigger points or tight muscles, so you can use it there. And then, as you said, what is the dog going to do? They're going to shift their weight to the other side and then forward, which means it's going to affect the back and the opposite front leg. So huge for finding trigger points and then fixing the trigger points.
Dr. Judy Morgan 34:58
Yeah, I can't tell you how many animals that would come in with hip dysplasia, you know, bilateral cruciate old tears. Yeah, and you know, you start to work on them, and what you discover is their problems are on their shoulders. They have spent so long pulling them, they're not pushing themselves up off the floor, they're pulling themselves off the floor, and so those elbows go, the shoulders go, the wrists, the neck, yeah, so many issues that we see in the front end. And I remember there was a client who was coming to me, and the dog had a stifle problem. This is a small to medium sized dog had a stifle problem, and she was going to her local vet, and they kept lasering the stifles, kept, you know, doing acupuncture, everything around the stifles.
Dr. Judy Morgan 35:49
and when I went over the dog, I was like, well, that's great that they're treating that area, but we've got 27 other areas that are just a train wreck from not being able to mechanically use the body correctly, and so it can be something, so even if you're the owner treating your, you know, you know your animal has an old cruciate tear, and you're like, oh, let me massage around the stifle, let me do, I've got my laser, I've got my red light, let me work on that, you're missing three quarters or more of the problem, because they're not mechanically using that leg correctly, which means it's affecting the opposite hind, the opposite front, and the shoulders, and the spine, and everything else.
Dr. Judy Morgan 36:35
so it's really critical to kind of do a whole body assessment, not get lasered in on that one area where you know there's an issue, but hey, look, we've got, you know, a lot of other things that are gone. That's kind of one of, I think, that might be why things like the underwater treadmill are so helpful, because it's kind of a whole body therapy.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 36:59
Yep. Well, and anyone I think who does acupuncture, chiropractic, any kind of manual therapy, massage therapy, should, and most of them do treat the whole body, not just one area.
Dr. Judy Morgan 37:13
Yeah, absolutely. It's it. We really can have tunnel vision, and I see it with has nothing to do with this topic, but I had a case where the veterinarian was so focused on, and the owner were so focused on the protein in the urine, and they kept doing lab work, they kept doing all these diagnostics for like four years, and she asked me to review her lab work, and when I looked at it, I said, What about the platelets that are like almost 2 million? Your dog has a bone marrow cancer that is affecting the platelets, and that's where the protein in the urine is coming from. But everybody was so focused on the protein in the urine that the rest of the lab work just really got skimmed over. It was like, oh, look, his kidneys, you know, they look great on lab work. I don't know why we have all the protein in the urine,
Dr. Judy Morgan 38:04
And so this had been going on for years, and when I said something to the owner, she burst into tears, and she's, I'm like, so how long has the cancer in the bone marrow been there, and who's been addressing that? And she's like, what, you know, talk about blurting out the wrong thing without any preamble, but I just figured she already knew about that.
Dr. Judy Morgan 38:22
Yeah, so then it was like, well, we got a different problem we got to work on. So, but that same thing can happen where we get tunnel vision, like, oh, he's limping on the right hind leg, there must be a right hind leg problem. Well, maybe he's got a lumbar problem, maybe there's something totally different going on.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 38:38
Super important, and I think that's one of the good things about rehab veterinarians is we are trained to look at the whole dog, literally. When I do an evaluation on a dog, it's a three hour appointment.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 38:50
we literally go through the history, we go through every muscle and joint down the back, from toes to shoulder, from toes to hip, everything, and then to me that is all kinds of puzzle pieces that we then put the puzzle together and look at the dog as a whole, and then say, here's our picture, this is what's going on, here's our tools, what's the best bang for our buck? And to me, it's I always tell people, everyone has their own time commitments, everyone has their own financial commitments. My job is not to tell them what to do, it's to lay it out and say, if this is my dog, this is what I would do. What would you like to do? And then go from there. I'm just a part of the team.
Dr. Judy Morgan 39:25
There you go. And that's a great attitude to have. We've got to take a break to hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back. Stay tuned.
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Dr. Judy Morgan 40:40
Welcome back to the Naturally Healthy Pets Podcast. I'm here with Dr. Laurie McCauley, rehab veterinarian extraordinaire. And so we've been talking about a lot of the things that your veterinarian can do to help diagnose where there are issues and problems and restrictions and trigger points in your pet, but we also want to empower pet parents to be able to do a lot of things at home to make their pets feel better, to find where there's problems, restrictions, and so there is so much that can be done at home. So we want to talk about those, and Dr. Laurie has amazing resources available for pet parents, so we don't want to leave those out because we know that people who listen to our podcasts are people who are kind of those pet parents who are at the next level who really want to do the best for their pets, so let's talk about some of the things that go into that. I would say for sure one of the things that can easily be overlooked, because we all have these crazy busy lifestyles, and a lot of times our animals sit home for six to 10 hours a day by themselves, and you know they're just quietly sadly waiting at home for us to, you know, their job is to guard the house and that kind of stuff, but you know when we get home they're like let's go do it, and then we're like, I'm busy, I got to make dinner, I got to do the kids homework, blah blah blah. So, how important is exercise, physical activity, mental stimulation for our pets?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 42:10
Huge. So, in even in the human world, they say the number one thing that you can do to increase longevity is exercise, and it's not just walk your dog, so in the human world they've shown that you need three different kinds of exercise. You need endurance exercise, walking, running, swimming, you need strength training, and you need proprioception and balance training. So that would be like your dancing or your martial arts or something like that, where you're moving your body in different ways, and you're you're turning on those nerve fibers that tell your brain where your body is in space, so strength training, endurance training, and balance training are all super important, and it's the same for the dogs, right? So, yes, take your dogs for a walk, or for a run, or play ball, or something with them, and we need to work on strengthening. There's specific exercises you can do to help strengthen the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that support the joints to either decrease the chance of injury. I'm a research nerd, it's just who I am. So, there was an official statement from the family physicians in Canada saying that strength training was the number one unutilized or underutilized form of pain control for osteoarthritis in humans, and this was over 10 years ago, right. So there's specific exercises you can do to help support the joints to take away the pain from arthritis. Exercise itself, when done appropriately, right, can actually stop pain, so you can decrease or stop drugs, which would
Dr. Judy Morgan 43:44
be amazing, so you don't end up with my Doberman, who you know succumbs to his Rymadil. so yeah, we'd never use that again on a Doberman in particular, or a Labrador. But another, another topic. Okay, so you have resources for pet parents, tell us about some of those, because I know you've got a lot of, a lot of things in the channel.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 44:05
I love to teach. So, we have core and more, which is exercises. It's 24 exercises, and I am not a person who says this is how you do the exercise. It's this is when you do it, when you don't do it. This is your biomechanics, so that you don't get hurt trying to help your pet, it's how you do it. How the dog's gonna cheat, because a lot of them are smart, and they're gonna go, "Oh, I can just do it this way, and it's easy, but that doesn't get what you want done.
Dr. Judy Morgan
I call them the sloppy sitters. Yeah, it's like I need you to do a sit to stand, and they flop on their side, right? And they've got legs sticking out in all directions. It's like, yeah, that wasn't a sit to stand, that was a flop to stand, it doesn't work the same,
Dr. Laurie McCauley
right? So, how are they going to cheat, and then how to prevent them from cheating, right? Because we have to out think them, which is always good, and it's a progression, so it's four exercises every two weeks, and you have a long time to be able to get through them, so there's that. So that's core and more
Dr. Judy Morgan 45:00
I have to say, so core and more. So, this is great. You've got four exercises to do with your dog. How many minutes a day, if you were gonna do this program, and you were going to do it on a daily basis, how many minutes a day are we talking?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 45:11
So, if you have the old fragile dog, it would literally be three to five minutes, three to five times a week. If you have the athlete, it could be up to 20 minutes, twice a day, five days a week.
Dr. Judy Morgan 45:23
Okay, but this is also bonding time.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 45:27
Oh, it's huge. The dogs love it.
Dr. Judy Morgan 45:30
You pay 100% of your attention is on me right now. So, while you're doing this, it's not the same time that you're scrolling through your phone or trying to, you know, do 20 other things. This is one on one time like really listening, looking, paying attention to what their body is doing, and they're telling you, and so people who are really big in the agility world, or these dogs that are doing different athletic things, those people are doing this kind of stuff, and they're spending that time, and they're really paying attention to what their dog's body is telling them. Now, we keep saying dog, but believe it or not, you actually can do a lot of these exercises with cats,
Dr. Judy Morgan
and you just need to find you have for cats, you have to have a very high value reward, so I will tell you that my daughter's cat, Edward, she can teach that cat to do literally anything for a freeze-dried chicken heart. She will bend inside out and backwards for a freeze-dried chicken heart. So you need to find I have one, it's pork tender, freeze dried pork tenderloin, anything you want that cat's in, if that's the reward. So don't think that we, even though we say dogs, because a lot of this is done with dogs, but if you have kitty cats, particularly kitty cats who are getting older and pretty sedentary, it's really critical that we engage their brains, their muscles, and like we said, 80% of them have arthritis, so let's you know, keep them moving as well. Okay, so we have core and more, what else do we have?
Dr. Laurie McCauley 47:06
So, so the company is Optimum Pet Vitality, okay? Right, because that's what I want, is I want Optimum Vitality for all pets.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 47:14
And then we have at home laser therapy. So the reason I created this course, I've been teaching on laser for professionals for over 20 years. Was literally now I have a creme de la creme clientele, and 70% of my clients had lasers, and 0% knew how to use them appropriately, and 100% of them were using it on themselves, not knowing how to do it appropriately. So we put together at home laser therapy, and it is all that, how to treat all the joints in the animals, so hips, knees, toes, necks, everything set out really easy. I show you simple anatomy, we show you how to do it on the dog, how to hold the laser, because positioning of the animal and positioning of the laser make a huge difference. huge difference.
Dr. Judy Morgan 48:06
I like that you said toes. It is so for a lot of our older pets who hate their nail trims, it's because they have arthritis in their toes, and they really don't like it's painful when you squeeze their toe to get that nail to extend to trim it, you're squeezing arthritic toes, and I can tell you with my arthritic fingers, I don't really want someone grabbing it and hyper extending it, because it's a little painful. So, if you have an animal who's been pretty good about their nail trims for most of their life, and suddenly they're not, could be they've got arthritis or restrictions, and they're kind of stuck, so they're just trying to, you know, if they're suddenly being really resistant to that again, that's just a clue that they're, they're talking to you, they're saying this kind of hurts, maybe we should do that a little differently.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 48:53
Well, especially if they can jam their joints, right? So if they're running down the road and they hit a pebble, it may jam their joint, just like if you're playing volleyball and your hand gets hit by the ball instead of your palms, it hurts. It hurts, and they don't have a way to say, 'Oh, you know what, I'm not going to step on this leg today. Right? You may see them licking, but a lot of times it doesn't. And then fascia, swelling, all of that - they can get infections in their nails. There's all kinds of things with their toes.
Dr. Judy Morgan 49:21
Yeah, so they're just trying to tell us, tell you, and sometimes they don't tell us very nicely, because it's like that, really did hurt. Okay, so we have a laser course, which is amazing. I would say everybody needs to be doing that, especially if you own a laser. If you have it, let's learn how to use it correctly.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 49:39
Well, the beautiful thing is, I have two sponsors, both Respond and Spectravet, which, that if you purchase the course, you get 10% off the laser, which more than pays for the course.
Dr. Judy Morgan 49:49
There you go. Awesome.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 49:52
And then we have our Fascia course, Fascinating Fascia, which goes through a little bit about Fascia, Myofascial trigger points, it goes through how to check for trigger points throughout the body, where the most of the trigger points are, and then different ways to treat them. So, it talks about it, talks about taping and instrument assisted a little bit on the tuning fork, and then we had so many people say, tuning fork, I want to know more about that. I haven't heard about that before. That we created Tuning Into Your Dog, which is 100% about using the Tuning Fork.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 50:30
And, and I'm anal retentive, if you haven't noticed. And I'm like, okay, so the Tuning Fork I have is amazing, but you can get really cheap ones, just like cheap blazers on the internet, and I ordered, and they suck. Seriously, the vibrations wrong, because I check all the tuning forks to make sure the vibration is right. I've had people say, oh, is that why? You know, I bought this cheap one, and it fell apart. So I never want anybody to say Laurie taught me this course, and it didn't work, so if you buy the course, we mail you a free tuning fork with the amethyst tip, because the amethyst tip is the best for soft tissue,trigger points, fascia, all of that stuff. Is that's where you're going to start.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 51:17
That's tuning into your dog.
Dr. Judy Morgan 51:20
Okay, you also have a PDF, the top five canine trigger points, so that's a freebie. Everybody can download that one.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 51:26
Yep, so if you text F A S C I A, so "fascia", do you have the phone number right there?
Dr. Judy Morgan 51:34
866-949-0068 We'll put that in the show notes.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 51:40
Yep, if you text that, we will send you a free PDF that shows you where the top five trigger points are on the dog, so that you can start to feel them and go, oh my god, there is one there, or oh, you know, my two year old puppy, he's fine,
Dr. Judy Morgan 51:52
it's good, it's good, it's all good, nothing to worry about. Yeah, you'll find one somewhere else, don't worry, they'll take a wrong step, they'll fall in a hole. Agility dogs, you know, they fell off the A-frame, hit a pole weaving, you know, all these different things that these animals can do. You know, which dogs amaze me? The dock diving dogs.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 52:11
Oh my god, neck issues, tail issues. Sorry, you see it from that. Wow, that looks really cool. I see it from the.. Oh my god, don't get hurt
Dr. Judy Morgan 52:19
To me, it looks really dangerous. It's like, oh my gosh, we're doing a belly flop. Like, I would never want to. I'm afraid of water, but.. and I just wonder, how you trained a dog to do that? Because I've got a bunch of non-swimmers, I've got a bunch that are like, "Don't you dare put me in the water, I will die. They can't swim, and I'm not going to save them.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 52:38
So, you talked about athletes again. I'm a research nerd, so they have studies that show that the most injuries happen in the dogs that are doing sports when either the handler is new or the dog is new, and they're not doing core exercises, right? So this is in a peer-reviewed published paper where they did who's getting hurt, so if the handler's new they don't know what they're doing, they may tell the dog to do the wrong thing. If the dog is a weekend warrior, right, so where they're either just doing their sport and they're not doing other exercises, or their work clients working all day, they pull them out, they may take them for a walk, and then on weekends they go crazy doing their thing full. Those are the guys that are much more likely to get hurt.
Dr. Judy Morga 53:31
That doesn't surprise me at all. I think we could see the same studies in human athletes. Yeah. Oh, you sat in your armchair all week, or you sat at your desk behind your computer all week, and now you're running a marathon on the weekend, that's perfect,
Dr. Laurie McCauley 53:43
right? Or just even think about, hey, I'm gonna go out with my friends, and we're gonna go play some basketball, or I'm gonna go horseback riding, and I haven't done it in 10 years, right? Or I'm gonna go water skiing, and you overuse those muscles, and that's when they're more likely to pop to tear, and as we get older, we have less growth factors to help our muscles heal, and our cells literally have less ability to use those growth factors to help us heal, so we heal much slower. and our dogs are the same.
Dr Judy Morgan 54:13
Yeah, aging is no fun. It's not for sissies.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 54:16
My mama used to say, and my mom was so wise, she said, I'm in great shape for the shape I'm in, because life sucks, but it's better than the alternative.
Dr. Judy Morgan 54:26
On the right side of the dirt,
Speaker 2 54:27
that's right. Yep, yep. And every day you get to choose between I'm either going to get smarter or stupider, so scrolling through my iPhone, right, versus learning things, and every day I'm either going to exercise and live longer or sit in a chair and do nothing and not live as long, and ame with our dogs,
Dr. Judy Morgan 54:49
exactly. It's the same thing with our animals. I mean, not having that mental stimulation, not having that physical stimulation is really huge.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 54:58
Can I throw one more piece of science? Oh, you.
Dr. Judy Morgan 55:00
Oh you may throw all the science you want
Dr. Laurie McCauley 55:01
I love science. So, in humans, actually, in humans, they have shown, you know, when we went through vet school, and we're about the same age, we were taught that you're born with the same number of neurons and they never change. Now it's proven wrong through research. They've shown that literally, if you're.. and they did this with people that were terminal and gave permission, people that did watch TV and sat in their bed all day, versus the people that learned a new language, learned how to play an instrument, they can test the neurons in the brain, and they found that the people that were learning had brand new neurons the day they died, which one is cool. They also did studies that show that if you do endurance exercise, it increases the new neurons in the brain, like in rats, literally, it increased the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is memory and learning five times the size when they exercise throughout their life, and that by doing strength training exercises, it didn't increase the number of neurons, but it increased the length of life span of each neuron. So, by doing both strength training and exercise training, you're increasing the life and the number of neurons in the brain, because we see so much cognitive decline in dogs.
Dr. Judy Morgan 56:18
Oh, we do so, so endurance, I mean, and you know, just getting enough to exercise, that's pretty easy to envision. How are we doing strength training with our dogs? I mean, it's easy for people. I'm gonna go lift a few weights, it's great. In my case, I haul hay bales and water buckets, but
Dr. Laurie McCauley 56:39
things like walking backwards and sideways with dogs, right? That's eccentrically using the muscles of stabilization. So, when you're walking forwards, you're using different muscles than walking backwards, and walking sideways works on the muscles that help stabilize the hips, the knees, the carpis, the elbow, the shoulder, all of that stuff that you don't get when you're just walking straight, but there's again, you know, there's a whole bunch of exercises, and it's putting them all together and knowing when to do them, when not to do them, right? The red flags of stop doing this, and how much to push your dog.
Dr. Judy Morgam 57:15
Do so, does your core and more course give people the exercises to do with their dogs to help improve all of that.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 57:23
It tells them when to start and when to stop, right? Because if I say I want you to do a sit up, right, and you do one sit up, great, that's not really going to help you a whole lot. But if you build up at some point, you're going to be like, okay, I could rather do, you know, instead of doing 1000 sit ups, I can hold on to the bars and bring my legs up and do 50 of them in 1/100 of the time and get more effect. So, you want to know what the right exercise is at the right time for maximum effect,
Dr. Judy Morgan 57:54
exactly. very cool stuff. I mean, so I'm so glad that you have courses, so people can get more of this information, just, you know, there's so much that we can do to make our pets' lives healthier, longer, more active, more engaged with us, and I think that's that's really critical, and I know that the, you know, the pet parents who are like, no, I want to do everything I can, and I think people sometimes get so focused on gut health and allergies, and you know, trying to fix all that stuff, that all of this gets overlooked, and if we have all these restrictions, yeah, the guts aren't working correctly, because everything's in a knot, and so all of this is really critical for that overall well-being.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 58:45
It's the pieces of the puzzle,
Dr. Judy Morgan 58:46
it's pieces of the puzzle, and that's what holistic medicine is all about, putting all those pieces together. So, if you're someone who's been really focused on getting the diet exactly right and getting the poop to look perfect. Think about all these other parts of the body that might be contributing to all of that not being able to get to that 100% that you're looking for.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 59:12
Yeah, it's everything you gotta work with. Sometimes it's better to work a little bit with everything than everything on one thing
Dr. Judy Morgan 59:23
that's perfectly said. We are out of time. Thank you so much for this incredible information. I think this is going to be so helpful to so many people, and those of you who are actually watching this and not just listening. Myra and Pookie were very happy to get a little tuning fork activity today. There you go. Thanks for listening.
Dr. Laurie McCauley 59:46
Thank you.
OUTRO
Thanks for listening to another great Naturally Healthy Pets episode. Be sure to check out the show notes for some helpful links. And if you enjoy the show, please be sure to follow and listen for free on your favorite podcast app. We value your feedback and we'd love to hear from you on how we're doing. Visit DrJudyMorgan.com for healthy product recommendations, comprehensive courses, upcoming events and other fantastic resources. Until next time, keep giving your pet the vibrant life they deserve.
DISCLAIMER
The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. It is no substitute for professional care by a veterinarian, licensed nutritionist or other qualified professional. You're encouraged to do your own research and should not rely on this information as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Dr. Judy and her guests express their own views, experience and conclusions. Dr. Judy Morgan's Naturally Healthy Pets neither endorses or opposes any particular view discussed here.
