PUPSBANNER2.JPG

PUPS DOG TRAINING SCHOOL

Promotes Positive Training at it's Best! Kind, Fair & Effective!

0

[email protected]

87740168

  • facebook
  • googlePlaces
  • instagram
  • Home

  • About Us

  • Our Method

  • Our Trainers

  • Our Gang

  • Our Services

  • Pet Dog Training

  • Behavior Consulting

  • Board & Train

  • Dog Sports Training

  • PUPS Trainers Academy

  • Jamming Studio

  • Leased Dogs Services

  • PUPS Show Gigs

  • PUPS Paw News Releases

  • Testimonials

  • FAQ

  • Contact Form - Dog Sports

  • Contact Form - Obedience

  • Instructor Enrollment

  • Special Promo

  • Blog

  • Podcast - Train Your Dog

  • Doggy Forum

  • Members

  • More

    Use tab to navigate through the menu items.
    To see this working, head to your live site.
    • Categories
    • All Posts
    • My Posts
    Dexter Sim
    Dash  ·  
    Jun 29, 2020

    Stem-Cell Treatments for Pets

    in What's Happening?

    Stem-Cell Treatments for Pets

    Wednesday, Jun. 25, 2008 By JENINNE LEE-ST. JOHN


    Blue leads an active lifestyle: she runs four times a week around an

    enormous park in her hometown of Memphis, Tenn.; she likes playing

    Frisbee and loves swimming. But one day last November, Blue started

    limping — which was odd because the German shepherd seemed fit and was

    only 3 1/2 years old. "She wasn't recovering as quickly as normal from

    a trek in the park. I thought that was just a sign of ageing," says her

    owner Twila Waters, 43, with a wry chuckle.


    In fact, Blue had hip dysplasia, a fairly common and sometimes

    crippling degenerative condition in dogs and cats. The cure — a

    complete hip replacement — would keep Blue in recovery for up to six

    months. So while Waters mulled the surgery, Blue's regular

    veterinarian sent Waters to see another local vet, Kathy Mitchener,

    who was trained in acupuncture, to treat Blue's pain. But Mitchener

    had a better idea. She offered a cutting-edge stem-cell transplant, a

    therapy not yet available to humans, that would potentially help

    Blue's hip repair itself.


    The treatment took just two days last January. Mitchener had recently

    become certified to perform the stem-cell treatment, pioneered by the

    company Vet-Stem based in San Diego. She removed some fatty tissue

    from the dog's abdomen and shipped the sample to Vet-Stem's labs,

    where technicians used centrifuges to extract stem cells from the

    tissue. The cells were shipped back the next day, and Mitchener

    injected them into Blue's failing hip, where they adapted and

    developed into the healthy cartilage and tendon cells the animal

    needed. Within 36 hours, Waters says, "Blue was moving well, and you

    could see ease in her gait." Vet-Stem kept a frozen store of Blue's

    stem cells, in case she suffers a relapse or has another orthopaedic

    injury, but for now, Blue is fully cured and back to running and

    swimming and playing with her friends.


    Vet-Stem's therapy is just the newest frontier in the booming field of

    alternative veterinary medicine — which includes acupuncture,

    chiropractic and aquatic therapies and traditional Chinese herbal

    medicine — an industry driven by pet owners who are increasingly

    willing to do or pay whatever they can to help their ailing pets. In

    the past decade, the number of vets who completed a 156-hr. training

    course is given by the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society

    (IVAS) has quadrupled. IVAS also recently added courses in herbal and

    food therapy, and Tui Na, a manipulative treatment like chiropractic.

    According to IVAS spokeswoman Vikki Weber, 10% to 20% of the society's

    trainees end up quitting Western medicine altogether. "There are other

    possibilities out there besides pills or a doctor's knife," says

    Mitchener, a veterinary oncologist who incorporated alternative

    treatments into her practise four years ago.


    Most progressive veterinary therapies are inspired by human health

    care. Burton Miller, who runs the Animal Wellness Center in Huntington

    Station, N.Y., became a practitioner of Eastern medicine for animals

    after suffering a skiing accident in 1996. He began reading up on

    alternative therapies for his injury and decided to apply the same

    kind of medicine to his animal patients. "I announced to my [clients]

    that everything I had ever told them was wrong," he says. Those pet

    owners promptly abandoned him, but today he has a thriving practice in

    which acupuncture and homoeopathic medicines are the most common

    courses of treatment. (A veterinary visit including acupuncture with

    Miller costs $65 — about what a human acupuncturist in Manhattan charges.)


    Unlike these older, more popular therapies, Vet-Stem offers — for the

    time being — better medicine to animals than any allowed for their

    owners: even though it does not use controversial embryonic stem

    cells, the fatty-tissue stem-cell transplant has not yet secured FDA

    approval for use in humans. But pets are reaping the benefits in

    droves. Since Vet-Stem began offering its online certification course

    in January, more than 1,000 vets have signed up to take it, many at

    the urging of their patients' owners. The FDA has so far approved the

    treatment for animals' orthopaedic problems in tendons and ligaments,

    and for bone fractures and arthritis. Vet-Stem says that some of its

    patients begin to feel better the same day, and most improve within a

    week. About 20% see no progress at all, but the company hasn't

    received reports of negative effects and it says it didn't see any in

    its earlier clinical trials. Vet-Stem is now testing stem cells to

    treat kidney disease in cats and liver disease in dogs.


    The cure-all doesn't come cheap. A cycle of stem-cell treatment

    generally costs $2,000 to $4,000, including the extraction, surgeries

    and follow-up. (Canine hip-replacement surgeries, however, can be

    about four times as expensive.) Robert Harman, Vet-Stem's founder,

    says that because of the steep price tag, he initially thought wealthy

    horse owners would be his primary clientele. "Turns out there's not

    quite the same emotional attachment to horses as in the small-animal

    world," Harman says. "It used to be if your dog got sick, you just got

    a new dog. Now people want the best care, and they want to pay for

    it." At the start of the year, Vet-Stem's patient pool was 90% horses

    and 10% dogs. By the end of 2008, Harman estimates those numbers will

    shift to 60% dogs, 10% cats and 30% horses — no doubt aided by

    word-of-mouth praise from pet owners like Waters. "It's comforting for

    me to know I've done what I can to alleviate Blue's pain," Waters

    says. "She loves to play so much that fixing her hip really improved

    both our qualities of life."

    0 comments
    0