Just a Dog Podcast · Episode 35 · July 17, 2026 · 45 min

The invisible injury | Why your dog's pain never shows up on a scan | Julia Robertson, Galen Myotherapy

In the mid 1990s, Julia Robertson had a 6 month old Labrador who couldn't lift his head. Nothing showed up on the imaging, nobody could name the problem, and she was told the kindest thing left was to put him to sleep. Then a vet came out, took one look and said he'd hurt his neck. Julia started asking him to lift his head for a biscuit, and within a week he could do it on his own. The injury had been real the whole time, sitting in the muscle and fascia that no scan shows. She founded Galen Myotherapy in 2002 and has treated thousands of dogs since, and plenty of them arrive with a label already attached: difficult, stubborn, anxious. When a dog's discomfort can't be seen, the change it causes gets read as behaviour. And when there's nothing on a screen to point at, the first person likely to notice is whoever lives with the dog. So this conversation is mostly about how to notice. Julia goes through what an old photo of your dog standing side on will show you about the body you look at every day, the 1 centimetre that decides whether a harness is bearable, and what a trot on the lead lets a sore leg hide. She treats dogs who can't be touched, and dogs with a bite history, without holding them still, letting them move away any time they want to. That's the same principle that underpins the question she'd like more of us to ask: What does my dog want? Find Julia and Galen Myotherapy Website | Instagram | Facebook Just a Dog Podcast Instagram | Substack | Facebook | TikTok