Veterinary Acupuncture
When Dr.
Galligan began practicing small animal veterinary medicine, traditional Western medicine was his primary line of care. In 2009, he began
investigating veterinary acupuncture. Eastern medicine has been used
for centuries and the positive results that it affords interested him
greatly.
In 2010, Dr. Galligan attended training
at the Chi
Institute (Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine) and became a
Certified Veterinary
Acupuncturist. Since that time, he has made his clients aware that
acupuncture could be an alternative or an additional option for
their pet. Today, he is able to combine both Western
medicine and Eastern medicine to enhance your pet’s quality of life.
While a cure is not generally possible,
significant improvement is likely. Multiple acupuncture treatment
sessions may be required before seeing concrete results.
The National
Institute of Health (NIH),
our highest
medical body of knowledge in the United States, published the following:
“Acupuncture as a therapeutic intervention is widely
practiced in the United States. While there have been many studies
of its potential usefulness, many of these studies provide equivocal
results because of design, sample size, and other factors. The issue
is further complicated by inherent difficulties in the use of
appropriate controls, such as placebos and sham acupuncture groups.
However, promising results have emerged, for example, showing
efficacy of acupuncture in adult postoperative and hemotherapy nausea and vomiting and in postoperative
dental pain. There are other situations such as addiction, stroke
rehabilitation, headache, menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, fibromyalgia,
myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, low back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome,
and asthma, in which acupuncture may be useful as an adjunct treatment
or an acceptable alternative or be included in a comprehensive
management program. Further research is likely to uncover additional
areas where acupuncture interventions will be useful.”
Additionally,
the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA),
reports the following:
(This vet gives alternative medicine lectures
to the AVMA)
Dr. Patti Schaefer, owner of Canisport Veterinary Services in
Washington State, will be speaking on holistic medicine in during her
lecture Holistic Approach to the Canine Athlete. She uses nutrition,
acupuncture, stem cell therapy, rehabilitation work, chiropractic
medicine and other forms of complementary care to help bring out the
best in the canine athletes she works with. "I know when I started
doing acupuncture in the mid-90s there was a lot of people who didn't
understand how it worked or helped, but now that we've seen successes
there are a lot of veterinarians who want to learn more about it to try
to help their clients," Dr. Schaefer says. "I have a lot of clients who
have gone for acupuncture for themselves after they've seen how much it
has helped their pets."
