September is National Pain Awareness Month, and as a Canine Massage Guild Therapist I can help you to keep a check on your dogs musculoskeletal health, which is vital for both mental and physical well-being.
Dogs can be very stoic and because they aren’t able to verbally communicate with us, it can be quite easy to not even realise that your dog is hurting.
When you bring your dog for a consultation with a Guild Massage Therapist, we will use our advanced palpation skills to carefully and methodically feel your dogs musculature, we will be assessing the soft tissue in detail and our training means that we can detect small tears, focal point tension within the muscles and taut fibre bands. This type of assessment takes many years of hands-on practice to perfect, so it’s not something that you can learn from an online course or a book. Having said that, we give our clients the knowledge to spot subtle behavioural or habitual changes that could offer clues to suggest that your dog might need a visit to your vet, and we use a very useful document called The Five Prinicples of Pain to help clients identify some of the subclincial signs of pain that may present in their dogs.
If you suspect your dog may be experiencing pain, your first point of contact should always be your vet, and in order to make an appointment with a Guild Therapist, your vet will need to provide their consent. All Canine Massage Guild Therapists work in accordance with The 1966 Veterinary Surgeons Act and Exemptions Order 2015 by never working on an animal without Veterinary consent. After completion of an initial course of treatment, your therapist will provide your vet with a written report to ensure continuity.
Canine Massage Guild Therapists regularly attend dog events and shows, providing free muscular health checks for attending dogs and this can also be a good way to help you assess your dogs condition, we can do this without prior Veterinary consent, but consent would still be required should you decide to come for treatment.
We often achieve behavioural improvements in the dogs we have treated, and that makes perfect sense really, with their pain levels eased, your dog will be much more comfortable and less worried about things in their environment that may trigger pain. We can achieve tangible improvements in such things as sociability, less reactivity, reduced hand shyness, reduced noise sensitivity and a generally happier dog to live with.
If you’re interested to find out if massage could help you and your dog, please get in touch… or you can find your nearest Canine Massage Guild Therapist by visiting The Canine Massage Guild website.
A link to the clinical trials mentioned in my flyer can be found here: https://www.k9-massageguild.co.uk/clinical-canine…/
Contact me
If you would like to discuss your dog’s issues to see if they may benefit from Clinical Canine Massage, please get in touch with me via email: clinic@seekak9massage.co.uk
Or visit my website: www.seekak9massage.co.uk
Or find me on facebook: Seeka K9 Massage