Early intervention with traditional healing is beneficial for arthritis in dogs

Traditional Chinese veterinary medicine is most widely known for helping animals with arthritis.

I would like to tell you about a couple of cases which demonstrate the effectiveness of acupuncture for arthritis in dogs and the importance of early treatment.

The first case is a 14-year-old mixed breed dog, which had been diagnosed with lumbosacral instability syndrome and had severe degenerative arthritic changes in the spine on radiographs. The dog had been having arthritic problems for many years and was gradually getting worse.

The dog had been treated with NSAIDS and then prednisone. The prednisone was causing the liver enzymes to go up. As a last resort the dog was sent to me to see if acupuncture would help.

The first day I saw the dog, it could not stand on its own, the owner lifted the dog with a towel under the belly and the dog used the front legs to move. The dog could put some weight on the left leg but the right leg was knuckled over. The dog could not raise its tail and had lick granulomas on its front legs.

The client's goals were to decrease or discontinue the use of prednisone, increase the strength in the rear legs, and increase the quality of life. The dog was treated with dry needle acupuncture and was set up for weekly treatments. At the third weekly treatment, in the middle of the session, the dog's tail started thrashing rapidly, this surprised us, but I knew this was a turning point since the movement of the tail was telling me Qi was moving through the spinal cord. The Life Quality Score was 300, which is OK.

When the dog returned the next week, the dog could stand without help and there was no knuckling of the feet. The owner told me the dog surprised her by walking from another room to the computer room to visit the owner. The dog kept improving with each visit and became fairly strong in its rear legs. It was taken off prednisone and its quality of life greatly improved with a follow-up Life Quality score of 565 (Great) two months later. All of the owner's goals were met through traditional Chinese veterinary medicine and they wished it would have been available earlier in this dog's life.

The second case is a 12-year-old pug, which for the last two months had been walking around with a hunched back. It did not want to go out, refused to go up and down the stairs and would whine. Some days it would scream out in pain.