In this video, Dr. Smolkin discusses alternative therapy for dogs and cats and how it can be combined with traditional medicine to come up with different treatment strategies. Topics covered in this video include acupuncture, herbal therapy, osteopathy, integrative care, quality of life, cancer treatment, back disease and integrated practitioner.

---

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I’m Dr. Ilana Smolkin for healthcareforpets.com. I’m a traditionally trained veterinarian, but I’ve also gone and done further training and certification in some alternative modalities as well. We have clients calling up or coming in that sometimes they already know that they’re interested in some of these alternative modalities so things like acupuncture, chiropractic care, osteopathy. Some clients have no idea these things are even available for their pets or don’t know which might be appropriate or where to go with their pet and what one they might be interested in.

We’ve done a series of videos for this site that you can watch, kind of describing a little bit about some of these different modalities that are out there. If these are things that you’re interested in, we encourage you to work with a veterinary professional that can work with some of these alternative modalities or work together with a separate practitioner that can do these for you but work together with them to get the best outcome for your pet. For example, I remember the first case that I used integrated medicine on. After vet school I had done training at an internship with a lot of focus on oncology or cancer treatment. When I came to my current practice, my first patient that I treated for lymphoma, a common cancer in dogs, I only knew the traditional treatments. My associate and I, we work together and he threw in all the integrated treatments for that dog. I saw less side effects than I had seen and I saw just such a better quality of life and the dog lived a little bit longer than it would have statistically speaking without those alternative therapies. And what’s more important than the length was that there was such quality there that I didn’t see alone with the medications that I had at my disposal from plain Western medicine. Other examples, certainly dogs with back disease, so I’ve seen dogs come in that can’t walk and you know ideally yes they would go for referral and potentially have surgery but for whatever reason this is not an option for all patients whether that’s a financial constraint or just what the animal can go through and I’ve seen some of these dog actually able to walk again with acupuncture which is just absolutely remarkable.

So we’re finding that when we combine traditional medicine with some of these alternative cares, this integrated care, we’re seeing better quality of life, longer lives, more comfortable lives and just better outcomes overall.

So if you’re considering an alternative therapy for your pet, take a look at one of my videos here and see if that gives you an idea of what you’d like to try and if you’re not sure, talk to your veterinarian or come into an integrated practitioner and they might be able to guide you.

Some of the people that I see, maybe they’ve come in for chiropractic care, ultimately when I get their history, I may discuss that I think that pet will respond better to acupuncture or herbal therapy and we can help guide you in that because what’s most important to us is your pet’s health here at healthcareforpets.com.