A new way to treat brain injuries
Jill Werner’s ‘lucky’ break landed her at the Pelino Athletic Performance Centre.
The centre’s senior physiotherapist with a special interest in concussion and brain injury broke her wrist in 2018 while living in California. When she was back in Niagara visiting her parents, she went online looking for someone who had a PEMF (Pulsed Electro-Magnetic Field) machine. The PEMF machine was something she knew would help heal her wrist.
“I googled and he (Joe Pelino) had one at his practice at Lake St and the QEW. I went in there, met him and we started talking,” the 54-year-old St. Catharines native said. “He was working with Ben Fox, who had suffered a stroke and I casually told him my specialty with stroke and brain injury. We started talking about that and we stayed in touch.”
Werner moved back to Niagara in October 2020 because she wanted to be around her parents in their golden years and her and Pelino reconnected.
“He told me it (the clinic) was happening and they were building it. I was in.”
It was an easy choice for Werner.
“He’s really open minded and was interested in a lot of the stuff I was finding in California.”
In California, she ran her own company, providing patients private treatment in their homes using advanced neuro-therapy skills. Werner worked closely with top doctors from UCLA and Cedars Sinai, including the latter for three years in the inpatient acute rehab department in Beverly Hills. She has successfully treated many high-profile actors, musicians, athletes, and executives and is often asked to travel significant distances to provide her sought after services.
Her experiences have made her an expert in the field.
“When you have a stroke and you can’t move one side of your body, you need to rehab the brain and body connection,” she said. “What I would see in an orthopaedic clinic when someone was rehabbing from a stroke, was someone trying to get the person to move their arm and that’s not fixing the connection. You have to think about it differently and you can rehab it.”
Pelino and Werner share that philosophy.
“It has grown from the things we talked about initially to what’s being created here with hyperbaric chambers and pool therapy. I have done a lot of pool therapy in my career and we kind of bounce ideas off of each other.”
Her vision for the clinic is impressive.
“The brain is my biggest focus so I want to create something on the concussion side where we can really rehab people quickly and fully. I feel a lot of what is out there right now is ‘Just rest and we are going to do these really baby steps. ’ ”
Using advanced technology at the clinic— some of it found nowhere else in Canada — Werner is looking to take giant steps in concussion care.
“There are so many things you can do that actually rehab the brain. It is not just resting. There are so many people with concussions and three, five, eight years later they still have lingering symptoms. They get better to a degree and then the concussion comes back to bite you in the ass 20 years from now,” she said. “We have created something where we make dramatic change and we can measure it. We have some really cool tools for eye measurement using AI and computers that you couldn’t do five or 10 years ago. To have that assessment piece, that is real. It is not having five words and having them read it back to me.”
She sees the clinic becoming a centre of excellence, provincially and nationally.
“I don’t think this exists. There are places that have pieces of it but they don’t have it all in one place. We are trying to find the things that all work together and have it all in one place.”
She wants to end the uncertainty for people seeking concussion treatment.
“How does the person who has a concussion or a parent of a kid who has had a concussion figure out that they need this, and they need this? There is no one guiding them and they are wandering from ER to family doctor to chiropractor to whatever. We want to bring it all together and have the evidence that what we are doing is working.”
As long as it is indicated for the patient, the core of Werner’s approach to concussion is nasal release technique (NRT). Jill is one of only four practitioners in Canada that can perform this manual treatment. It involves the insertion of a balloon into the turbinates of the nasal cavity and then it is expanded. This helps to open or re-open the airway, leading to increased oxygen to the brain, as well as relaxation of eye muscles. The procedure is preceded by a RightEye visual tracking assessment, and is followed by PEMF therapy, EWOT (exercise with oxygen therapy), and a THOR red light helmet treatment, which is the first available in Canada. A re-assessment using RightEye, gives Jill data to show how the NRT treatment has impacted eye movement.
Concussion treatment is only part of what the centre will offer.
“We will be doing extremely advanced baseline testing for athletes so that they know what their brain speed and brain health is before they even get a concussion,” Werner said. “That is the best way to know what is going on if you do hit your head.”
Werner has strong ties to Niagara.
The graduate of Governor Simcoe competed in soccer and rowing when she was growing up. Kathy Lichty Boyes was her first rowing coach.
“She gave me a great base,” said the former St. Catharines Rowing Club member, who was a spare for Team Ontario for the Canada Games.
After graduating with a physical therapy degree from the University of Buffalo, she started her career in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and then worked at Niagara Rehab and in Toronto before moving out to California after being accepted into a one-year mentorship program.
“My intention was to come back after one year but it’s California… I ended up staying for 15 years.”
Stroke, brain injury and concussion have always been central to her work.
“I worked with concussion before it was cool,” she said, with a laugh. “Before, you just got up and shook it off and carried on. There was no assessment and it wasn’t treated as a thing unless you were throwing up on the side of the field. Then it was, ‘Don’t fall asleep tonight and wake up every hour’. Concussion isn’t a thing people became really aware of, and started to take seriously, until the last 10 years.”
Jill is currently accepting new patients and second opinions at the temporary clinic, located right next to the future permanent home of the Pelino Athletic Performance Centre.
