Integrative Approaches to Pet Pain Management

Pet owners love their cats, dogs, and other furry friends as a member of their own family, and nothing is more heartbreaking than watching them suffer. When your pet is in pain, you’re sure to want to do anything you can to help them find relief, but for animals with serious injuries, chronic conditions, or persistent illnesses, this is rarely an easy task.

Keeping your pet comfortable and pain-free isn’t as simple as slipping them a pill every day. These short-term fixes often have long-term ramifications on an animal’s health, and don’t work towards easing or eliminating the root cause of pain in order to improve a pet’s quality of life and reduce their need for drugs and other medical interventions. Taking an integrative approach to pain management for your pet can be the key to helping them find lasting health and comfort!

What is Integrative Medicine?

Integrative medicine is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of focusing on only one treatment method or diagnostic lens, it integrates many different methods and disciplines to work together and help an animal to heal and find relief.

This isn’t an approach that’s unique to veterinary medicine. Many people have great success mixing Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, for example, combining drug treatments with practices like acupuncture. A doctor may counsel you to get a flu shot while also recommending herbal teas with honey for getting through a bout of the flu. A sports injury can be treated with surgery and painkillers in tandem with physical therapy and massage. The best treatment plans are the ones that form both inside and outside your doctor’s office.

The same is true for your pets! Approaching an animal’s injury or other health condition only from a perspective of medical interventions like surgeries and painkillers not only limits your options for ways to reduce your pet’s discomfort, but it might hold you back from the possibility of finding treatments, such as physical therapy, that can address the source of pain and give your animal long-term results. Integrative medicine welcomes all possibilities, taking a well-rounded approach to give your dog or cat the tools for success.

What are Different Types of Integrative Medicine?

There’s not necessarily any one “type” of integrative medicine, because the concept relies on combining many different kinds of medicine and treatment into one approach. Furthermore, integrative medicine looks different for every patient! No one animal is the same as another, not even two animals of the same breed with the same health condition, and with integrative medicine, there’s an emphasis on finding what works in each individual case, leaving methods that don’t produce the desired results for your pet to the side.

There are dozens of different methods that can come together to create an integrative pain management plan for your pet. This can include anything from physical therapy and monitored exercise to massage, nutrition, hydrotherapy, weight loss, and many more. Working with your veterinarian and experts trained in these alternative methods, like the team at Prime Pet Rehabilitation Therapy, will help you put together a pain management plan for your furry friend that will drastically increase their comfort and improve their outlook!

How Does Integrative Pain Management Improve My Pet’s Life?

As a pet owner, you know that caring for your dog or cat is about more than just feeding them and taking them out or cleaning their litter box. It’s about loving them and attending to all of their needs, not just what they require for basic survival. Integrative pain management takes a similar view of things. Improving an animal’s health and quality of life is about more than just reducing their pain in the here and now. It’s also about attacking the root causes of pain, discomfort, and health struggles to create a better quality of life for your pet.

For example, you might not think that a weight loss program has any bearing on the treatment of a dog with arthritis. However, consider how much strain an overweight dog goes through just to walk and move around normally. Carrying excess weight can be exacerbating their arthritis without you even realizing it, and focusing treatment only on their joints can give them some pain relief, but not as much as would be possible if they achieved and maintained a healthy weight to lessen the strain on their body. Or, consider a dog who’s recovering from an injury. A meal plan might not mend a broken bone or repair a muscle strain, but it will give your dog valuable nutrients that they need to heal and keep their energy levels up, giving them the best chance at recovery they can possibly achieve.

Emphasizing integrative medicine is one of the many ways that we here at Prime Pet Rehabilitation Therapy follow the Coerenza Approach, a holistic method of veterinary healthcare that requires an animal’s entire wellbeing to be taken into account. Our main goal is to give pets the happiest, healthiest life that we possibly can. Using these methods helps us to do just that!

Interested in learning more? You can contact us today at (843) 839-5335 or info@primepetrehab.com to speak to our team for further information.