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Prancing on Air
Competing against adults, Natasha Coventry
from Cowes, aged only 14, recently won both Novice and Preliminary dressage
championships. This created quite a stir and she was awarded a “Most Points”
trophy – after only six months training!
 Nowhere
more than in dressage, are the rider and horse both
under inspection. Each has to perform excellently, and the teamwork has to
succeed too. In this discipline, an unbalanced jockey can cause problems as the
horse automatically compensates. This thwarts the perfect outline that the
competition requires. It’s no good one member of the team being fit if the other
is not. Chiropractor Vav Simon had been treating Natasha and her ponies
Charlie and Milo since she first started riding as a youngster.
As they all improved, Vav’s job changed.
Originally it was to straighten out both horse and human after falls and other
mishaps. Now it’s less therapy and more fine tuning – in discussion with their
trainer – spotting subtle links between the ponies’ performance problems and
Natasha’s posture and directions.
 Chiropractic
works entirely by hand. It aims to realign all bones
that are not in their proper position in relation to the bones either side. Once
misaligned, these bones are held out of position by ligaments and may cause pain
or movement difficulty. Vav’s adjustment is fast, gentle and usually painless,
and relies on deft accuracy rather than brute force.
Misalignments can be minute. Fractions of an
inch within the joint can result in ‘trapped nerves’ which make an enormous
difference to the ease of movement of the limbs. And in dressage, this is
exactly what the judges are looking for – rhythm and control. Anyone who has had
sciatica will know that sitting down and getting up again are thoroughly
inelegant! Sciatica is a good example: caused by a misalignment in the low back,
it can be quickly and easily treated by chiropractic.
Vav’s Natural Therapy Centre for Animals,
based in Ryde, has just had its fifth anniversary.
She’s been treating animals since childhood on the family farm in Scotland.
After training in chiropractic for humans, she completed the postgraduate course
for animals. Moving to the Island twelve years ago, her dream is to bring
together the best range of complementary therapies that she knows to work.
Alongside chiropractic, she offers massage, homeopathy, herbal remedies,
electro-stimulation, acupuncture and healing.
She has had huge numbers of successes: her
patients include horses, dogs, cats and other animals, some from farms, and from
zoos occasionally. They have ranged from life and death emergencies through to a
few requiring many months of patient determination – from animal and owner, as
much as Vav. But while she is proud of these more difficult ones, most of her
cases only need one or two treatments.
Dog owner Cheryl Blakely is also
celebrating. Rocky, her 2 year-old Cocker Spaniel, won
the Good Citizen class at Crufts this spring. She said “After jumping out of the
car, he wasn’t walking with his usual flowing fluency. Vav tuned him back in and
he quickly became his merry happy self again. Without her help, we wouldn’t be
where we are today!” |
