Dr. Constance DiNatale is on her knees, straddling a bull mastiff with gum problems and a stiff backside.
"I don't like the way your rear end feels," she says, pressing her thumbs aside the dog's spine. "You're all locked up back here."
It seems the jowly 7-year-old pooch -- an agility champion by the name of Beowulf Vigilante Lady -- may have overdone it during her morning workout, and now she's out of alignment. DiNatale prods and pulls, but Vigi, as owner Penny Rowley calls her, seems oblivious, standing contentedly on a big floral mat.
"She likes it," Rowley says. The Winter Park woman has never been apart from the dog since the pet came to live with her as an 8-week-old puppy. Not only do they attend training sessions together; they've also been to a doggy dentist and massage therapist, and recently they embarked on canine hydrotherapy.
"I'd just do anything for her," Rowley tells the doctor.
Here at the clinic of Veterinary Acupuncture & Complementary Therapy in Winter Park, it's a common sentiment. Many of the humans initially tried a traditional route to ease their pets' arthritis, allergies, skin conditions and cancers, with varying degrees of dissatisfaction.
Already this afternoon there have been two dogs once pronounced goners by other vets. One is the leggy and demure Beau, a 2½-year-old white and brown greyhound bitten more than a year ago by what was apparently a poisonous snake or spider. The dog's entire left hind leg ballooned with swelling, then turned black. Owner Beverly McCartt, a foster mom for homeless hounds, was told by her first vet that Beau would die. The second one said the leg would have to be amputated.
But after months of home treatments, Beau's leg has made great progress, although there is still a raw-looking wound. "I thought I'd see what else we can do for him," McCartt says.
Dr. Deneen Fasano, the other vet here, gingerly places her hands on Beau's underside, feeling his pulse in various spots. Then she kneels beside him and sticks a series of 15 tiny needles atop his head, along his spine and down his legs. Though this is the dog's first acupuncture treatment, he merely sniffs curiously at the probes.
"Look at how pretty you are," Fasano murmurs.
For about 20 minutes, she'll let the needles do their work balancing the dog's qi -- his vital bodily energy.
There's an unusual sense of tranquillity in the clinic -- sans the typical barking and yowling of a vet's office -- in part because only a few "clients" are here at any particular moment. But it's the aura of the place too. Despite its location on a somewhat industrial- looking stretch of Clay Street, between a printing shop and a gym, this former warehouse is light, airy and pleasantly odorous.
"I did the floors this morning in peppermint and lemon," explains Tom Purl, a veterinary assistant. "And I just did a spritz of lavender oil and distilled water between clients."
Until Fasano came to share the workload last September, DiNatale was often booked weeks -- if not months -- in advance. Alternative veterinary medicine, it turns out, is still hard to come by, with only a handful of practitioners in Central Florida. But it does have a lengthy history -- at least 3,000 years ago, the Chinese were using acupuncture on their warriors' horses and farm animals.
"When I went to vet school," the 39-year-old Fasano says, "they were still not very open-minded about things like this."
Certainly there was a time when such depth of devotion to an animal would have been ridiculed, when geriatric or disabled pets were left to fend for themselves. Yet before the doors close at the clinic this day, there will be a Yorkshire terrier with a ruptured disk in its neck, a 14½-year-old shepherd-retriever mix recovering from a stroke, and a 13-year-old golden retriever that has survived cancer only to battle arthritis.
Having finished consulting volumes on Chinese herbs, Fasano returns to Beau with a jar of ointment, a bottle of tiny herbal pills and some instructions. She quickly plucks out the needles. "Since he's hurting a lot," the doctor says, "it would be good if we could see him again next week. The acupuncture will help speed up the healing."
McCartt gazes into her greyhound's eyes and rubs his head. "We can do that," she says. "Can't we, Beau-Beau?"
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