Moving a joint over its full range

Moving a joint over its full range

Recently Miss Ward gave a clinic to about 50 horse people in the Middleburg area. Among the equine pa- • tients she treated was one horse which was in such pain and stress it would jump every time it was touched and even fell over on occasion. Many people in the audience seemed skeptical that Miss Ward would be able to cure this case.

She worked on the animal for about half an hour, massaging it, applying slight pressure to the muscles and then stretching them and moving them through their full range of motion. When she was finished she invited people from the audience to come up and touch the horse, even punch it. The animal never moved, despite repeated prods, but just hung its head contentedly.

“It was neat to see everybody’s mouth drop after that,” Miss Ward says with a smile.

When she is working on a problem animal, Miss Ward usually starts on its head.

“The fastest way to get a horse relaxed is to work on its head,” Miss Ward explains. “A lot of horses carry tension in their mouths. ”

Miss Ward demonstrated on a mare whose owner said she was imbalanced in the ring and would rear to one

The work isn’t over when the spasms have gone, however. Then the muscle must be stretched and exercised or the problem will return. Showing horse owners how to do these exercises on their horses once they are cured is the most important part of Miss Ward’s teaching.

Miss Ward first discovered she had magic fingers when she made her father walk again after he’d lain on his back for days with chronic back pain.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she explains with a laugh. “He’d been to all types of doctors but couldn’t get cured. I bought a book called Pain Erasure the Bonnie Pruden Way and started doing the exercises on him, and he got up and was okay.”

The experience motivated Miss Ward to find out more about curing pain through massage and touch. After getting a degree in psychology, she worked in a chronic pain and holistic health clinic — a clinic that uses several different types of pain curing methods to heal people — as a biofeedback technician measuring 'tension in muscles.

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