Pamper Your Pooch: The Benefits and Basics of Dog Massage
Massage is a healing art that has been practiced for hundreds of years. While it may seem like massage is a luxury reserved for elite athletes and spa attendees, massage can be a great form of preventive care for all, including your pet. If you’ve had a massage before, you probably remember feeling relaxed and perhaps a little sore, depending on the type of massage you received. There are numerous...
Relieving Muscle Pain in the Dog’s Lower Back & Hips
There is one common issue that affects performance dogs as well as older dogs. It is sub-clinical pain or “aches” in the muscles of the lower back and/or muscles of the hips. Clinically these usually do not present themselves in the form of a physical problem or illness. These issues are not typically recognized by the owner/handler. I will usually pick them out while taking a history from the client....
Canine Digital Thermal Imaging
Wouldn’t it be great if we could see where our dog’s pain is coming from? If we could see the functioning of the body instead of just the structure like we see in radiographs? With Canine digital thermal imaging, we can see exactly that. The Canine Digital Thermal Imaging system that we have is an infrared camera with state of the art medical imaging software known as, Digatherm. The science...
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy for Dogs
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) has been used on humans for years[1], and now this amazing science is looking to be applied for healing dogs, too. While scientists in Vienna are working on cancer treatment for dogs, Americans are promoting new ways of treating those injuries of their pets that used to be impossible to fix. When used, Hyperbaric medicine treatment, or HBOT, raises the oxygen level in the blood and promotes healing by allowing the...
What is Laser Therapy?
Laser therapy is a specific form of light-based therapeutic intervention that utilizes controlled applications of low-intensity, coherent and monochromatic light (i.e., LASER) in humans and animals to produce clinically-beneficial outcomes. Laser therapy has previously been known by many names, including 'Low Level Laser Therapy‘, 'Cold Laser‘, 'Soft Laser‘, and 'Laser Phototherapy‘. The National Center for Biotechnology Information now recognizes ‘photobiomodulation’ as the official MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) term, specifically defined...
Team Up to Tackle Pain
Just like with most successful hospital initiatives, recognizing pain in our patients and committing to appropriate pain-management therapy should be a whole-hospital approach I wish the following statements were purely historical, but as shared by Dr. Michael Petty during a discussion of the business of pain management, they are being spoken in veterinary clinics today by some of our colleagues. “Pets don’t feel pain like we do.” “It will help...
Canine Physical Therapy
There are many types of non-traditional therapies that benefit dogs! Canine sports medicine and rehabilitation is a relatively new specialty in veterinary medicine. Physical therapy (also called physiotherapy) has long been used for humans to help preserve, enhance or restore physical function impaired by disease, surgery or aging. What many people don’t realize is that physical therapy and rehabilitation can also enhance and restore function for our dogs. The dogs...
HYDROTHERAPY FOR DOGS – GUIDE, COST, BENEFITS
Hydrotherapy for dogs is a medical practice that uses water to relieve dogs of certain joint and bone pains and problems. Hydrotherapy or more specifically, canine hydrotherapy basically uses the main properties of the water namely buoyancy, viscosity, hydrostatic pressure and resistance. Buoyancy is the ability or tendency of a body to stay afloat or rise to the top of a liquid or gas. Such properties of water enable dogs...