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A DMI milestone for Europe: a rare certification comes to Switzerland
Fabienne Theler is now the first therapist in Switzerland — and one of fewer than four professionals across Europe and Asia — to hold the DMI Intermediate A certification. Here's why that matters for your family.
Some milestones are worth pausing for. Fabienne Theler, MSc PT, has successfully completed the DMI Intermediate A certification — making her the first therapist in Switzerland to hold the qualification, and one of fewer than four professionals across Europe and Asia to have finished this demanding training.
For the families who work with us in Zug, this is more than a diploma on a wall. It means one of the most advanced levels of Dynamic Movement Intervention practised anywhere in Europe is now available here — woven into ORCA — Objective Reasoning & Clinical Architecture, the clinical framework behind everything we do.
A first for Switzerland
DMI certifications are earned in stages, and each stage is harder to reach than the last. Intermediate A sits near the top of that ladder: it stands for the ability to build complex, highly individual treatment plans for children whose needs don't fit a standard protocol. Very few therapists worldwide train this far — which is exactly why bringing the qualification to Switzerland matters.
What this means for your child
- Access to advanced DMI expertise without travelling abroad.
- Treatment plans built for your child — not adapted from a template.
- A therapy team mentored directly by the founders of the method.
- One framework, ORCA, connecting assessment, therapy and follow-up.
The therapist behind the milestone
Fabienne holds a Master's degree in physiotherapy from King's College London with a specialisation in neurology. She practises more than 180 hours of DMI therapy every month, and receives continuous mentoring from the founders of the method, Jake Kreindler and Jo-Anne Weltman — a privilege very few therapists in Europe can draw on.
That volume matters. DMI is a hands-on craft as much as a science: the more hours a therapist spends reading a child's responses and adjusting in the moment, the sharper the therapy becomes. Monthly mentoring from the method's founders means the newest refinements arrive in Zug almost as soon as they exist.
"The certificate isn't the goal. It's the proof that a child in Zug gets the same level of DMI as a child anywhere in the world."
— The Apexa teamWhat DMI actually is
DMI — Dynamic Movement Intervention — is an evidence-based approach designed for children with neurological developmental delays. It uses carefully targeted, repeated movement challenges to trigger automatic body responses and activate the central nervous system to build motor skills. It is particularly well suited to children with cerebral palsy, genetic syndromes such as Down syndrome, hypotonia, or motor delay without a clear diagnosis.
Where DMI fits inside ORCA
We never use DMI in isolation. Within ORCA, targeted sensory stimulation is combined with motor training so that a child's processing of the world and control of movement develop together. The approach is grounded in current developmental neurology — and tuned, session by session, to each individual child.
A centre with international reach
The certification joins an integrated intensive-therapy model that already includes TheraSuit therapy for strength, posture and gait, the SpiderCage for functional training with weight relief, Galileo vibration training for neuromuscular activation, electrical stimulation (TASES/NISE-Stim), and sensory integration work — delivered as one-to-three-week intensive programs, individually planned and closely monitored.
All of it happens on the shore of Lake Zug, in a calm, family-friendly setting that families reach easily from across Switzerland and neighbouring countries — and where rest days are genuinely worth having. (Our interactive family map is a good place to start planning those.)
