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Pet Rehab & Manual Therapy in Jupiter, FL
As a part of our holistic approach to veterinary medicine, we offer a variety of rehabilitation and manual therapies to help your pet.
What is pet manual therapy?
Chiropractic Adjustments:
Chiropractic adjustments are not just for sore muscles and aches & pains! Restrictions (that’s what gets ‘adjusted’ during spinal manipulation) can affect not only the movement of the skeleton and limbs but can also affect all of the organs and processes inside the body. This is because every organ in our chest and abdomen and every endocrine organ and hormone in our (and our animals’) bodies are controlled by nerves that leave the spinal cord and then pass through little openings between the vertebrae. If the vertebrae are not perfectly aligned, then the nerves passing through the tiny spaces between them will be affected, which obviously affects the muscle/joint/organ/hormone controlled by that nerve!
We often talk about chiropractic issues as being caused by adhesions and spasms in adjacent muscles and other tissues that restrict the normal movement of vertebrae and any other joints, but these small spasms and restrictions actually restrict blood flow and lymphatic flow to the nerves that control everything. Without the neurological output to the muscles, bones, and organs (and more importantly, the neurological feedback through these nerves to the Central Nervous System), nothing can function properly, whether it’s your back & neck or your immune & hormone systems!
We use special palpation techniques to help identify these restrictions during our hands-on exam, and sometimes the act of ‘feeling’ for restrictions during our exam (motion palpation) will be enough to cause the restriction to release.
Rehabilitation Exercises:
During our exam and discussion, we assess Range-of-Motion (ROM), flexibility, muscle mass, tone, and strength and determine how these are affecting your pet’s ADLs (Activities of Daily Living). There are many other factors that affect ROM and mobility that we’ll also address to help your pet rebuild or maintain mobility and flexibility. We encourage you to actively assist in the process of helping & healing your pet. We can demonstrate recommended rehab exercises and stretches, link you to professional demonstration videos, and, if necessary we can schedule follow-up visits where we perform the rehab exercises.
These are similar to, yet very different from, chiropractic spinal manipulation. Osteopathy deals more with finding and releasing restrictions in the fascia/connective tissue around the blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and internal organs so that they can move freely with the body as the body moves.
Massage:
Therapeutic Massage is used to help release restricted/spasmed muscles (which affects all joints, nerves, vessels, and other muscles) and to help direct toxins and blood and other fluids in the spaces between cells back into the systemic circulation where they can be properly processed.
We offer some massage as time permits during our initial exam, and we can also schedule follow-up visits that focus on massage.
