Okay, okay, so this may be a weird question, but I've heard of some of the real country doc osteopaths using their OMT skills on pets and livestock.
I have friends, with pets, who have asked me about it ( I am a fourth year DO student doinf an OMT fellowship). If anyone out there has info, stories or sources, I would appreciate anything I could get on the subject. ----- Thank You! ICQ 28041421

:eek: :eek: :eek:

this one time, at band camp, i had a pet goat and.... :rolleyes:

:eek: :eek: :eek:

this one time, at band camp, i had a pet goat and.... :rolleyes:


Beastieopathy anyone!!

Okay, okay, so this may be a weird question, but I've heard of some of the real country doc osteopaths using their OMT skills on pets and livestock.
I have friends, with pets, who have asked me about it ( I am a fourth year DO student doinf an OMT fellowship). If anyone out there has info, stories or sources, I would appreciate anything I could get on the subject. ----- Thank You! ICQ 28041421

Manipualtive and physical therapies are increasingly used in veterinary medicine, particularly in the horse-racing industry, but more broadly nowadays on livestock and household pets.

The chiropractic profession now offers courses in 'animal chiropractic' (basically spinal manipulation applied to non-humans), see for instance Royal Mlebourne Insitute of Technology's post-grad studies at http://www.rmit.edu.au/compmed/animal-chiropractic-pg This course is available to qualified chiropractors, veterinarians and osteopaths (who are not medically qualified in Australia, but receive more extensive training in OMT than their US counterparts). The American Veterinary Chiropractic Association can be found at http://www.animalchiropractic.org/

Similar courses are available in the United Kingdom specifically for osteopaths http://www.oca.uk.com/O%20for%20A.htm

In both Australia and the UK, the norm is for co-management between the manual therapist and veterinarian. Animal physiotherapy (physical therapy) is just as common. Therapeutic massage (mostly of racehorses) is now widely practised on non-human animals http://healing.about.com/od/massagepets/

Whilst animal massage seems common enough in the US (see http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/18108_tl311.shtml), osteopathic physicians and vets don't seem to have too much to do with each other. The only reason for this that I can think of is the decline in the use of OMT by US DOs.

And perhaps it's partly because chiropractors (who are all lumped into the quack category willy-nilly) have gone into this field in their usual rhetorical style (the louder snake-oil salesmen seemingly outnumbering the more scientifically oriented chiros) that American osteos are a little shy of offering their services to their veterinary cousins.

In fact, the only instances I can find of US DOs applying OMT to non-humans are in the lab.

For the life of me I can't see why folks might find it strange to use OMT on animals. Indeed, until its talked about seriously by the profession, it'll stay out in the sticks with the 'real country doc osteopaths'

For my part, it was jealousy of the cat and dog getting all the fondling that led me to seek out manual therapists in the first place! Why should the bloody cat get all the good stuff?!