Animal Physiotherapy & Rehabilitation

Exciting News! Arcata Animal Hospital is expanding our Rehabilitation Services to offer new modalities for enhanced patient comfort and well-being. Stay tuned for more updates!

What is Animal Rehabilitation? Animal Rehabilitation is a branch of veterinary medicine that involves using a variety of treatment modalities to reduce pain, improve flexibility and range of motion of joints and muscles, restore strength and function of muscles and joints, prevent further injury and promote quality of life in our patients.

What types of conditions can be helped with Animal Rehabilitation?

Animal rehabilitation helps a wide variety of our patients. Although rehabilitation for post-surgical patients is what most people are familiar with, there are many other conditions that are helped tremendously by rehabilitation services. These include:

  • Post-operative Rehabilitation: To reduce pain and enhance healing
  • Orthopedic Conditions: Anterior Cruciate Ligament Rupture, Medial Patellar Luxation, Osteoarthritis conditions, Tendinopathies, Muscle Strains
  • Neurologic Conditions: Intervertebral Disc Disease, FCE, Wobbler’s, Polyneuropathy

  • Senior Pets: Osteoarthritis, Muscle Atrophy, Weakness
  • Palliative Care: Improve comfort and mobility for our patients who are facing terminal illnesses such as cancer or other conditions that are not able to be cured.

Our support and monitoring includes:

  • Post-operative Rehabilitation: To reduce pain and enhance healing
  • Orthopedic Conditions: Anterior Cruciate Ligament Rupture, Medial Patellar Luxation, Osteoarthritis conditions, Tendinopathies, Muscle Strains
  • Neurologic Conditions: Intervertebral Disc Disease, FCE, Wobbler’s, Polyneuropathy
  • Senior Pets: Osteoarthritis, Muscle Atrophy, Weakness
  • Palliative Care: Improve comfort and mobility for our patients who are facing terminal illnesses such as cancer or other conditions that are not able to be cured.

Manual Therapies Rehabilitation Modalities Regenerative Medicine Physical Modalities We use a variety of modalities including: Therapeutic Exercises Include joint mobilization, soft tissue mobilizations and stretching, massage, range of motion exercises. (Please note this is not chiropractic treatment.) Acupuncture, LASER therapy, heat and cold therapy, Therapeutic Ultrasound, Electrotherapy, PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic therapy), and Piezo-ESWT (Piezo-Electroshockwave Therapy) We provide customized exercise, massage and stretching programs for your pet to be done at home. We are working toward providing additional in-hospital exercise programs.
 This is a very exciting new form of medical therapy that uses the body’s natural processes to reduce inflammation, repair damaged tissue and improve structural function. PRP (platelet rich plasma) & Stem Cell therapy (from fat tissue) are two modalities that we offer.

Next Steps Before your pet starts rehabilitation services, we will do an in-depth orthopedic, neurologic and rehabilitation examination. It is very important that we have a complete understanding of your pets needs. When a pet has an orthopedic, neurologic or other problem that affects mobility and function, our pets, just like us, will adjust to compensate for the problem. This creates stresses and strains elsewhere in the body that also need to be addressed along with the primary problem. To be success and to achieve our rehabilitation goals, it is important that all of these issues are addressed. It is also important to have an accurate diagnosis of the primary problem. If needed, we will recommend other diagnostic testing as needed to make sure we have an accurate diagnosis.