Ever Wished Your Dog Could Talk?

Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows the feeling. Something’s wrong and you don’t know what. If only they could talk and tell you where it hurts, so you’d know what to do for them.

Ruby, my Golden Retriever, had been limping on and off on her right front leg for a while. Actually, a long while - several months, maybe even a year or more. It would come and go, and didn't seem to unduly bother her. She would limp briefly, hold up her paw, which we'd check, find nothing there, and she'd be on her way, seemingly forgetting about it.

Then one day the limping came on with a vengeance. Out hiking, she would walk a few steps, stop and hold up the paw, we'd check, find nothing, she'd walk a few more steps and hold the paw up again. Back home, she wasn't her usual self and seemed to be asking for something, but we couldn't figure out what. If only she could tell us! Well, she could, or at least, her body could, by using surrogate energy testing.

For those not familiar with Eden Energy Medicine, energy testing has a big role in the accurate determination of what is needed in terms of techniques. We use an indicator muscle to check the flow of energy, and can localize any point on the body to discover where energy is unbalanced, sluggish or otherwise upset. With small children, very sick people or pets, where asking for resistance in a muscle is impractical, surrogate testing is used. So instead of asking Ruby to "please hold out your paw and resist against my pressure", we have someone touch Ruby while we test their indicator muscle to show us what's going on with Ruby. I acted as the surrogate, while my partner, Tod, did the testing.

In less than a minute I had, with one hand, scanned the whole of Ruby's right leg, while Tod was constantly testing against my other outstretched arm. My arm faltered at the shoulder muscle. We went somewhere else and tested then went back there and tested again. Definitely "weak", i.e. I couldn't keep my arm up against his downward pressure while I was touching Ruby on her shoulder muscle.

I palpated the muscle to see if I could feel any differences in the tissue quality. I'd massaged this muscle many times, but palpation is different. It's more precise and focused. I moved my fingers over the muscle in small increments, letting them sink in and feel for knots or adhesions. Suddenly I was feeling something odd, something that felt like a small stick or toothpick lying horizontally under the skin, slightly embedded in the muscle, something that felt like - a cactus spine!

We live in Sedona. Cacti are everywhere. Ruby has often got a few spines stuck in her. She usually lets us know and we get them out. Sometimes it requires tweezers and a lot of patience, but we always get them out. Or so we thought. We'd obviously missed this one and it had apparently been in there for some time, embedded deeply in the muscle. Thanks to energy testing, we were able to locate the culprit and have it removed without a single x-ray or expensive MRI.