Pet Injury Follow Steps –

Short notes with instructions for you to follow after your dog has been injured. I do also work on lots of cats as well as a variety of other animals. If you want to know more about cat specifics right now (because I haven’t finished developing the cat pages), please search for cat in the search box 🙂

These recommendations also work if your pet isn’t moving as well as they used to because of arthritis or advanced age, for instance, and you would like to help them.

Please have your pet evaluated by a veterinarian if you have not already, so that we may all work to be on the right track for your pet’s recovery. It is very likely that your veterinarian does not know about this style of rehabilitation, because it is home-based, so feel free to share this site with them. I am available to discuss with your vet and provide teaching seminars for clinics, too!

For more specific info on a particular injury or diagnosis, please see the menu at the top bar or use the search box on this site. For more info on why I don’t have ever injury and recovery ever posted on my site yet, see this page or this page 🙂

1) Get the right book with a successful plan for you to use at home

Books:

Most pet (and often human) orthopedic and soft tissue injuries may be recovered without surgery when there are no broken bones, and some injuries with broken bones recover well without surgery, too! Your veterinarian should be able to help you decide if surgery is necessary for your pet’s broken bones. More on this later-

The information in this booklet also contains a GREAT foundation-building, functional recovery base for older pets that have lost muscle mass & strength and have lost some proprioceptive abilities, lost the ability to maintain balance and know where they are physically in relation to their environment. The 4-week foundational program in the book is often what is needed to help older dogs that are slipping on the floor or having trouble rising or are tripping over the doggie door threshold.

More strengthening and drills should be added after this program. A full 12-week, progressively difficult, program designed by me or a practitioner with a lot of experience and training in exercise physiology program design and functional recovery is what I’m about! For most people and pets, even a little bit of improvement makes everyone happy and makes a big difference in quality of life.

You have to start with a specific foundation, though, at the beginning, to make sure your pet has a solid foundation to help offset additional injury.

Please also pay attention to the discharge instructions your veterinarian has given you if your pet just had surgery or you have received instruction regarding your pet’s injury.  Please pay special attention to the part about no running, jumping, or playing. If you follow my booklet instructions, you and your pet will be doing work appropriate to recovery and should not be causing any harm. Still, no running or jumping or playing! You may, however, incorporate the directions I give to you for allowable activity. Otherwise, your injured pet should be restricted!

Right now I only have one book published with information about helping your pet build a foundational base through four progressive weeks of work after injury. This is the book, then, to get you started and the one to order if your pet has lost any degree of function, especially in their hind end.

This book is specifically addressing torn knee ligaments, yet until I am able to publish the books I am working on that deal with hip issues, other knee issues, elbows, old age/arthritis, and spinal issues, the book below will be helpful to you for those situations, too. This book contains the restrictions and advice I would give to get you started after almost any orthopedic injury or diminished functional condition.

Note that your pet’s veterinarian really needs to evaluate most injuries sooner than later, even if you think you know exactly what the problem is. Unless you have a full range of personal experience with diagnostic knowledge and an x-ray machine, you might miss something very important! And even veterinarians can run into orthopedic or neurological problems they aren’t sure how to treat, so joining with a specialist like me builds your pet’s recovery team!

Please do not involve additional work until you have passed the 4-week foundation with gold stars! Please follow all the instructions for the best outcome 🙂 Please do not (again, I say it, because you’d be surprised at how many people think adding other work to this intro recovery system is a great idea) don’t add swimming (no swimming yet), stairs (no stairs yet), hill repeats (no hill repeats yet), poles (no poles yet), cavalettis (no cavalettis yet), or other dynamic activity.

Your pet may seem to be doing great and may seem to you like she/he is healed, especially if they have good pain medication, but I can assure you that biologically the minimum amount of time for soft tissue recovery is on average 8-12 weeks. Some situations take up to a year to heal well (nerve damage, torn muscles, etc…), so please don’t be fooled by appearances or by programs that don’t understand biological recovery science. Best way I know to say it ^^ and I’ve seen complications from hundreds of cases where a proper foundation wasn’t followed 🙂

Being able to walk a mile or around the block a day doesn’t matter if your pet has function problems elsewhere in their life, so get this info, follow it, and establish a solid base. If your pet can walk a mile but can’t get up off the floor, this plan is for them. The book explains more about this approach.

After the base is built, then always there are additional strengthening and proprioceptive drills to be done in order to return your pet to a better quality of movement and lifestyle!

Conservative treatment after torn knee ligament, instead of surgery:

Amazon for USA, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT, & UK
Amazon in other countries
Books are also available on Barnes and Noble and you should be able to order from any bookseller (available on Kindle and in paperback).

Also, if the injury you are concerned about is a torn knee ligament in your dog, then please click here to read more info (then return to the instructions on this page!).

2) In addition to thoroughly reading any of that ^^ info, please watch > this video < twice, and begin to do this massage daily for a month.

Please watch the video to see my recommendations on method of use for massager unit AND so you will hopefully have success introducing the buzzy massager.

There are also written instructions under the video on the linked page.

Here is what the massager looks like, and if you click on the picture, you may buy it on Amazon if you choose:

there is additional information about where you might purchase this particular massager in the written instructions under the video. I am often asked if this massager or that massager will work, and the answer is, “no, not as well”. There are “we love science” reasons for my choice.

3) If your pet is still limping 5-7 days or more after surgery, please read this > pain post < all the way through!

There is more on the topic of pain within the books-

Check out other resources under the “Rehab Resources & Tools” link in the menu under the website title at the top or by clicking here.

If you would like advanced or personalized exercises, then contact me for a consult. There is a contact form at the bottom of this page <<Click on link . Use this form if you would like to schedule a paid phone or in-person consult with me for rehabilitation for your pet.

Blessings-
Rehabdeb

(Updated January 25, 2018. First posted on this site April, 2015)