Alternative pain therapies can help provide relief to pets, in addition to or instead of traditional medications. Familiarizing yourself with alternative treatment options gives your practice additional options to offer clients, helps provide better patient care, and further establishes your practice as a trusted healthcare resource for pet owners in your community.
Popular Alternative Pain Therapies for Pets
Pet owners are increasingly open to alternative pain therapies for their pets, mirroring the increased acceptance of these treatments in human medicine.
- Chiropractic Care – Chiropractic care is focused on manipulating the neck, spine, and joints to improve alignment and allow the body to heal itself. It can have a positive impact on both joint and nerve issues.
- Massage – While chiropractic treatments focus on the manipulation and alignment of bones and joints, massage emphasizes the muscles and soft tissues in treating pain while promoting a full range of motion.
- Nutritional Support – Nutritional support includes specialized diets and supplements that correct dietary deficiencies contributing to an animal’s pain. Treatments may be designed to help the patient maintain a healthy weight, offer the building blocks for better joint support, or be based on herbal traditions of pain management using supplements. For example, glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate, which are building blocks of joint cartilage, can slow cartilage deterioration and thus decrease pain.
- Acupuncture and Acupressure – Based on Chinese medicine of how energy travels through the body, both acupuncture and acupressure are meant to restore the proper flow of this energy. Acupressure uses focused pressure delivered with fingers, hands, or simple tools, while acupuncture uses thin, sharp needles to stimulate energy flow.
Adding Alternative Therapies to Your Practice
In many instances, your existing veterinary equipment can provide the suitable therapeutic space you need to offer alternative treatments. Unlike “modern” medicine, which often requires increasingly large, bulky, or specialized equipment, alternative therapies often use simple tools or no additional equipment in the therapeutic process. It creates a very friendly cost of entry for offering alternative pain management therapies in terms of money and time invested. Here are some examples:
Alternative Treatment Space
Additional veterinary surgery equipment, such as an exam and treatment table, helps position animals for most direct physical treatments requiring manipulation. This can be set up in a spare exam room for a more flexible treatment space for traditional and alternative medicine. Alternatively, you can create a “low-equipment” room with just the necessities for the alternative treatment offered.
Complementary Health Products
Expanding your retail selection to include specialized nutritional support, supplements, and aromatherapy oils can help drive sales while complementing the treatments done in the office. Starting this product expansion slowly, focusing on the items you’ll be recommending most often scales your costs to match the growth of your practice.
Staff Training
As you add treatments, staff will need training to support their role in the practice as it relates to alternative therapy. For many, this may be no more than awareness training to help them better communicate with patients. Others, however, may need more specialized classes to help them assist you in treatments or offer the treatments under your supervision, where allowed by state law.
Add Alternative Pain Therapies to Your Practice
Alternative treatment options give you one more way to take care of the pets in your community. With the proper training, equipment, and supplies, it can be a profitable addition to offer in addition to or instead of more traditional veterinary treatments. We proudly offer professional-grade animal care supplies and equipment for veterinary, kenneling, and pet services providers. Order your equipment from TriStar Vet today.