RAPID (FOR A TORTOISE) HEALING
Hit by a car. Hind legs damaged. Electro-acupuncture to the rescue.
FORT LAUDERDALE — An ailing gopher tortoise, with a cracked shell and injured hind legs, is being needled into recovery.
The 10-year-old tortoise — a threatened species in Florida — is undergoing electro-acupuncture treatments at the South Florida Wildlife Center in Fort Lauderdale.
The30-minute sessions, rarelyused on tortoises, combine acupuncture with electric currents to stimulate damaged nerves, speed healing and help with pain relief.
So far, the grass-eating slowpoke seems to like her sessions.
“She’s a little fidgety at first, but a couple minutes into it she relaxes,” said Dr. Carolina Medina, a veterinary acupuncturist. “Acupuncture releases natural hormones from your body that make you
feel good and decrease pain, so most patients feel pretty relaxed.”
The 15-pound tortoise is currently the only patient getting the high-tech treatment at the center, which helps an estimated 200 turtles and tortoises every year. She’s been at the center since April 9, when volunteer Melanie Lemieux found her struggling on the side of a road in Fort Pierce.
“She was moving fast, dragging her back legs behind her,” said Lemieux, of West Palm Beach. “I didn’t think shewas going tomake it.”
The tortoise was not given a name because she will eventually be returned to the wild, said center spokeswoman Deborah Millman.
Her legs had nerve damage that would not have responded to traditional medications, so the vets decided to give electro-acupuncture a try. She got her first treatment the day after arriving at the center.
“She’s been steadily improving with each treatment, but tortoises heal very slowly,” said Medina, a vet at Coral Springs Animal Hospital.
Land tortoises, which can live up to 60 years in the wild, need to be able to use their back legs to dig deep burrows to bury their eggs.
During the session, Medina places acupuncture needles on the tortoise’s back legs, then uses alligator clips to connect electrical leads to the needles. For the first month, the tortoise was getting treatments every week. She now gets them every twoweeks.
Experts at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission had not heard of electro-acupuncture being used on a gopher tortoise, said agency spokeswoman Carli Segelson. Neither had officials at the Sawgrass Nature Center in Coral Springs or the Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton.
“It’s not very common on tortoises,” Medina said. “I
just decided to try it on her to try to increase her mobility. She is only the second tortoise I’ve treated.”
Not every animal is suited for electro-acupuncture. It’s been used on dogs, cats and horses, but won’t work on lions, tigers or other animals not accustomed to human touch, Medina said.
“We need them to be still for 20 minutes,” Medina said. “Some of the exotics we can’t use it on because they couldn’t stay still that long.”
So far, the treatments seem to beworking.
Dr. Renata Schneider, the center’s director of wildlife rehabilitation, estimates it will be another six months before the tortoise is ready to be released back into the wild.
“We want to make sure she’s walking completely normally,” Schneider said. “She still has aways to go.”