Dog Massage for Hip Dysplasia: Bladder Meridian

Video Transcript

"The next step in working with hip dysplasia is to actually do a massage of the full back. Because those hips are sore, the whole body tenses up. All the muscles are used a little bit abnormally, just to keep the animal to be able to move at all, so you want to give a good massage down that bladder meridian. The bladder meridian runs from the very top of the head right down through on either side of the spine, all the way down to the tail, so nice downward, steady, heavy movement. Don't be afraid to move that skin, put some real pressure on. You can see Cocoa likes that one. She says, oh, that's an excuse to sit, I'll just have that. You can do this for about a minute. This is something nice to do if you're curled up in front of the television, and the dog's curled up with you. This is a really nice thing to do for them, even if they don't have hip dysplasia. These are the muscles that carry all the weight of the body, and it's never a bad thing to do that for them. Another meridian you can massage that helps a lot of arthritis cases is the kidney meridian, and that's on the underside almost in the same area, so think of that stripe coming the other side of the body. And you want to massage, again use some fairly good pressure. Now if you've got a dog who's got stomach problems, you want to be a little careful of this, but it does help as well, to move this meridian."