Physio-Center on Lesbos complements MVI’s offer

No one has continuously provided physiotherapy for refugees, so we are now the first one to offer this specific kind of support. Most of our patients suffer from chronic back, neck and shoulder pain. Most of this pain is due to injuries caused by the living conditions at Moria Camp, lack of physical activity, bad quality mattresses or lack of mattresses, and much more. In our Physio-Center we can help these people in a focused and purposeful way.

Until now, Lesbos lacked a place for physiotherapy as an important component of their treatment approach. In the first week of April, after months of work and with enormous help of your donations, we finally opened our physiotherapy centre. It’s the first one on Lesbos that was created to treat fugitives.

Since its opening, we have offered physiotherapy, Feldenkrais movement therapy and massage courses. We want to offer some refugees internships nand practical training so they can perform their own treatment. The centre is open to everyone and we have already achieved great results with many of our patients.

Of course there are also some problems that we will have to solve in the next few weeks. One of them is that we only have one female physiotherapist, which means that women have to wait longer to get appointments.

Over the next few weeks we have organized a separate weekly course for men and women in which our therapists will teach and work together with a yoga trauma therapist. This is a two-hour lesson dedicated to back pain in order to teach the refugees exercises and stretching movements which they can then carry out independently. Our overall goal is to equip the refugees with their own skills and abilities so that they can help themselves and others in the future.

An increasing challenge is also that many of the refugees do not appear at their follow-up appointments. The main reason for this is that the Arabic and Farsi calendars differ from the Gregorian ones. This requires a high degree of communication and creative solutions. This area will be also closely worked on in the near future.

The new Physio-Center proves to be an excellent addition to the care of the refugees in every case. We will try, hopefully with your help, to maintain and expand this offer.