pet connection

This is how it was: My chow mix, Colleen, had something really wrong with her leg. This was a long time ago, when I was less pet health-savvy than I am today, and when the use of specialists was far less common in vet med than it is today. It was also a time when many of the sophisticated surgical techniques we use on pets today had yet to be developed at all.

But I was worried about Colleen. She went from now and then pulling up one of her rear legs, to limping, to carrying it. Her regular vet said she had luxating patellas, based on a physical examination. I took her to an orthopedic surgeon, who said there was nothing wrong with her knees at all; she had hip dysplasia.

Today I’d probably get her hip replaced, but he didn’t recommend it then. Come back, he said, in a few years; we’ll see how she’s progressed. And that was that — for him.

For me, it was just the beginning of trying to get my dog back on four legs. I’m still not sure about that diagnosis, but I do know what ended up being the cure, and it was something that Gina blogged about yesterday, acupuncture.

My chiropractor, who had helped me with a painful shoulder, told me about a holistic vet in nearby Oakland. “You’ll love her,” she said. “Her name is Cheryl Schwartz.”

So I made an appointment, and took Colleen over to Cheryl’s clinic across the bay. It was in a borderline industrial neighborhood, on a big lot with a huge fenced yard for the dogs to hang out in until it was their turn to see the vet. The office was full of leftist political posters, a huge tropical fish tank, and shelf after shelf of books on everything from feminist politics to herbal medicine. It was all presided over by her very glamorous cat Hollywood, John, her office manager, and later his assistant, Baci the Shih Tzu.

But that first visit, the only thing I remember is that Colleen walked into Cheryl’s office on three legs, and walked out on four. For most of the rest of Colleen’s life, a regular schedule of acupuncture kept her active and pain-free. In her most senior years — she lived to be 15 — she started having trouble with stairs, and we added Adequan injections and oral glucosamine supplements to the program.

When she was around ten or so, I took her to see the orthopedic surgeon who’d examined her all those years before. He got out her old x-rays and took new ones. He told me he had never seen a dog with so little progression of arthritis or joint changes after such a long time; the films were almost identical.

I’m not suggesting that acupuncture trumps a hip replacement. The surgery has progressed enormously in the years since Colleen’s initial diagnosis. But it’s very hard for those who assure me acupuncture is ineffective, just a placebo, to get me past that three-to-four leg transformation, and the fact that those needles kept my dog’s pain and arthritis under control for years, without any side effects at all.

Unless you count the happy bounce she gave whenever she saw Cheryl, or the way she stretched out and napped, quietly snoring, while the needles were in.

Cheryl went on to become a teacher of Traditional Chinese Medicine to other vets, and to author a wonderful book on TCM for pets called Four Paws, Five Directions: A Guide to Chinese Medicine for Cats and Dogs, which I highly recommend. Another book about TCM, although it’s not about pets but about humans, is The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, by Ted J. Kaptchuk.

I’ve gone on to write about pain control in pets a great deal. It may be the single topic on which I’m the most opinionated, and I don’t shy away from the miracles of modern pharmacology, either. Pain isn’t holistic, and it’s certainly not good for our pets, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get rid of it. And whenever possible, I’d prefer to eliminate the cause of the pain rather than just treat it.

But acupuncture is still one of the first tools I reach for when a dog or cat needs help with chronic pain. It’s helped dozens of my pets since it first helped Colleen, and it’s worth looking for a qualified pracitioner and see if can help your pet, too.