How to Treat a Dog With Arthritis

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Bob Pane, with South Kendall Animal Clinic. Let's talk a little bit about treating a dog with arthritis. There are many modalities to do that. The first thing I'll recommend is exercise, swimming, massage. Massage the large muscles. Usually, the arthritis is in the hips, or the knees or the elbows. So, you massage the triceps or the biceps or the front arms, or the quadriceps and the hamstrings, and even the forelegs of these guys so they could feel a little more warmth and maybe some more, less spasticity of the muscles. Things like NSAIDS we recommend. Not aspirin, not Tylenol. We recommend products from your veterinarian that are made for the stomach and they won't irritate the stomach as much, that helps reduce the pain and inflammation. There are pain medications, like Trimedal, we use for real bad pain at night and they can't sleep. We use that as well. There are things like Chondroitin and Glucosamine, and 3 Omega Fatty Acids we recommend, and there are certain products that are better than others, and you can ask your veterinarian about that as well. My dog is on all the modalities I just talked about, and we gave her stem cells as well. There's a new modality called stem cells that we don't have to take fetuses. We take, actually, fat from the dog. We take a piece of that; send it to a lab. They come back the next day or two days later. We have to anesthetize the dog again, the canine again, the pet again, and we give the injections sterile-ly, inside the joints and through the veins and it does extend the quality of healing in the areas that have been eroded, like the arthritic areas of the knees and the hips. There's also, now, acupuncture, massage therapy that we have people that are, veterinarians that are involved with that, and they also do physical therapy where they actually massage, do hydrotherapy in a known setting, and use different techniques for physical therapy that you see in human medicine. It helps these dogs live a lot longer, with a better quality of life. So, we recommend going to your veterinarian and finding out what the best choices are for your pet."