AMELIA santos

Pelvic Physiotherapist

Amelia completed her postgraduate qualification at University of Melbourne in 2004. She is a qualified physiotherapist with over 15 years of experience in lymphoedema and pelvic floor rehabilitation. She works in various hospitals and women’s health private practices before starting her very own clinic in 2013.

Amelia has a strong passion in early detection of secondary lymphoedema post breast cancer treatment. She strongly believes early detection is a key element for preventing secondary lymphoedema to establish.

The other strong passion of hers is to help patients with chronic defaecation problem to retrain their bowel function and maximizing their quality of life. In this program, Amelia will help you to find out the possible contributing factors of your presenting bowel problems and formulate a management plan. Amelia is trained to find out if your muscles around the rectum and the abdominal muscles are working efficiently for the defaecation process and/or working adequately to help control your bowels. She is also trained to help you improve your bowel emptying and/or bowel control via dietary changes or efficient use of appropriate laxative at the right time. Management plan is individualised and could include lifestyle factors modification, choosing the right laxatives or weaning off laxatives, defaecation technique modification, breathing technique modification, stretches, and optimising the abdominal and pelvic floor muscle function for effective defaecation. She is also experienced in using rectal balloon biofeedback therapy (which involves placing a small balloon in the rectum during the training session at the clinic) to retrain the sphincter and muscles around the rectum to perform correctly during defaecation or respond timely to defer urge. This therapy can also be helpful to train the rectum to register a proper urge to empty. The first consultation usually takes an hour. Although this could vary between individuals, most patients require an average of 3-4 sessions of training at the clinic to achieve sustainable outcomes as getting the brain to learn new habits takes time. These training sessions are organised over a 3-6 month period and patients need to practice their new routine on a daily basis at home.

Outside work, she enjoys trying out different restaurants with her husband and two teenage daughters. Her 3 toy poodles (Princess, Cookie and Malibu) love to follow her everywhere.