At first Lisa Cohen chalked up her cat Topaz’s lethargy to laziness. It took a friend’s intervention before she began to notice changes in his behavior. “My friend looked at Topaz and noticed his head was hanging,” says Cohen. The incident spurred Cohen to schedule an appointment with her veterinarian. She was horrified to learn that Topaz’s kidneys were malfunctioning.
Topaz was prescribed medication, but the medication’s side affects only seemed to make him worse. “Watching him suffer was unbearable,” says Cohen, a Decatur, Georgia-based online antiques dealer.
After doing some research, she discovered that a local vet used alternative and mainstream medicine on injured and critically ill pets. “I was willing to try anything that would ease Topaz’s pain,” she says. During the visits, Cohen held Topaz while the vet inserted fine needles into Topaz’s body. “The treatment seemed to immediately calm him,” she recalls.
Acupuncture is a medical treatment using very fine needles that are inserted into specific points on the body. It is believed to have originated in the Far East at least 7,000 years ago. It wasn’t until the 1970s that acupuncture was used in veterinary medicine. In 1974 the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society (IVAS) was founded in Colorado. Today there are four institutions, including IVAS, that train veterinarians to perform acupuncture.
Jamie Molinelli, a veterinarian at Baltimore’s Eastern Animal Hospital, has been practicing acupuncture and alternative veterinary medicine for the past seven years. She says that acupuncture is best used as a complementary treatment with Western medicine. “The treatment is extremely effective for musculoskeletal problems and also works well on pets with gastrointestinal and lung issues,” Molinelli says. “I had a cat with a two-year history of diarrhea and was able to cure her with a combination of acupuncture and herbal medicine,” she notes. The treatment, along with herbals, is also an effective complementary treatment with chemotherapy as it helps reduce nausea.
If you’re interested in investigating acupunctural treatments for your pet, seek out a veterinarian who has been certified by the following four schools: the Chi Institute, IVAS, Colorado State, and Tufts University. “In Maryland and Hawaii it’s legal for non-vets to do acupuncture on animals. Humans and animals are anatomically different and you could be putting your pet in danger if you take him to a vet who has not been trained to perform the treatment on animals,” warns Molinelli.
Expect to pay $60 to $80 per session, with an overall commitment of $300 to $500. Herbal treatments will be additional. Most treatments require four to six visits, scheduled one to two weeks apart.
For Cohen, acupuncture was a godsend. “I got my old Topaz back,” she says. Soon after he began treatments, the cat began eating normally and became his old bouncy and energetic self. Although he died eight months later, Cohen says the acupuncture treatments eased Topaz’s pain and helped offset the medications he had been prescribed. “I recommend it highly,” she says, “especially for animals that are experiencing any kind of pain.”
To learn more about the treatment and to locate a certified veterinary acupuncturist, log on to www.IVAS.org
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