eight month writeup on trying acupuncture, cold laser and an underwater treadmill for our 12 year old labs arthritis after the rimadyl alone stopped being enough, i went into the integrative clinic a full skeptic and came out 1900 dollars lighter, so here is the honest ledger, what measurably worked, what did nothing we could detect, and the one thing i wish we had started two years earlier

Scout is our 12 year old lab, 74 pounds, and in january he stood at the bottom of the stairs one morning and just looked at us, which if you have a senior dog you know is a sentence with a whole paragraph inside it. xrays were $310 and showed arthritis in both hips and his left elbow. rimadyl plus gabapentin bought us real improvement through february, and then by april we had plateaued somewhere well short of the dog he was, and our vet suggested the integrative rehab clinic two towns over. i want to be clear about who i was in that conversation, i am the guy who says "placebo" at thanksgiving, i asked my vet point blank if she was sending me to buy essential oils for a dog, and she said try it for eight weeks and measure everything, which turned out to be the best advice in this whole saga.

the menu and the prices, because every thread on this stuff is allergic to numbers. initial integrative consult $140. acupuncture $85 a session, weekly for the first month then every two weeks. cold laser $40 as an add on to each visit. underwater treadmill $50 a session, twice a week for ten weeks then weekly. adequan injection series $320 for the loading month. cbd oil $60 a bottle because i figured while we were in for a penny. all in we are right around $1,900 over eight months, which i say out loud so nobody walks into this thinking its a $200 experiment.

the ledger, and per the vets advice we tracked actual markers on a whiteboard, stairs taken per day, whether he attempted the car jump, walk length, and how long from lying down to standing. underwater treadmill is the clearest win in the data, the rehab vet measured his thigh circumference at intake and again at week ten, he put back 2 centimeters of muscle on his rear end and the getting up number dropped from painful to almost normal, also he gets in the tank like a man arriving at a spa. adequan plus acupuncture is where honesty gets complicated, the week of the third acupuncture session he took the stairs voluntarily for the first time since january, but the adequan loading month overlapped it exactly, so i cannot tell you which one moved the needle, i can only tell you something did and we kept both. cold laser, we detected nothing in eight months of numbers, we kept it because its bundled into the visit and the rehab vet believes in it, i remain open to being wrong. cbd, nothing we could measure after two bottles, dropped it.

the one thing i wish we had started two years earlier is the muscle work. everything we are paying to rebuild is muscle he lost between age 10 and 12 while we assumed slowing down was just what old dogs do. if you have a 9 or 10 year old big dog, the treadmill is cheaper as maintenance than as repair, that is the sentence i wish someone had posted where 2024 me could read it. questions for people further down this road. 1. is adequan maintenance monthly forever once the loading month is done, thats what were being told and its $80 a pop so i want to hear from people a year in. 2. has anyone actually seen cold laser move a measurable number, i want to hear from a believer with data. 3. how do you decide when youre spending for the dog versus spending for yourself, because at 12 that question is starting to sit at the table with us