Massages for Your Pet

I am working on my certification for canine massage. here is an article about the benefits. -->

While various types of massages have been beneficial for a wide variety of stress related conditions, both physically and emotionally in people, only in recent years have increasing numbers of both veterinary technicians, veterinarians, and human massage therapists become interested in applying various types of massage to our companion animals, who certainly suffer from a number of physically and emotionally stressful diseases.

While excessive stimulation of what is known as the sympathetic nervous system is involved with a host of ill effects on the body, various massage techniques, as well as modalities like Tellington Touch may result in a stimulation of the parasympathetic vagal nervous system, resulting in reduction of stress and pain in a variety of conditions where excessive sympathetic nervous activity is involved including various hormonal and chronic digestive tract disorders.

Some of the various disorders where massage can be tried include pets with chronic back or disc disease/spasm; in helping relax patients for restraint, as well as potentially even reducing food intake and thus possibly help reduce the growing epidemic of obesity in veterinary medicine. Because such patients feel better, they are also likely to become more active, also helping with weight issues. Because we know the benefits of massage on human infants and survival, early massage of young kittens or puppies undergoing a lot of emotional or physical stress also may help reduce mortality. This is certainly an area of veterinary medicine that I hope continues to grow as part of the various holistic supportive treatments, along with proper conventional care in increasing treatment efficacy and survival of a host of conditions.