Pet Acupuncture and Life
Traditional Inuit whale acupuncture.
The post Pet Acupuncture and Life first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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One of the many characteristics that point to the fact that I am elderly is that I like to read the daily paper. Or, in the case of the Oregonian, the 5 times weekly paper. I have been reading the paper since I could read. As a nod to modernity, I read it on line. Perhaps a nod to aging, I do so because I can increase the font size. Seriously. All time best inventions: clean water, vaccines, and the ability to increase font size.
The paper’s format has not changed in years. News section. Opinion section. Sports. And the Life section, where there is advice, horrorscopes, reviews and the occasionally problematic column.
As an example of problematic, I came across Treating animals with acupuncture has gone mainstream. That wily, old acupuncture. Going mainstream since 1972.
Before we delve into the article, I wondered about the history of animal acupuncture. Turns out acupuncture has been used on animals as long as humans. They just took human charts of meridians and acupoints and laid them over animals. Which is why horses have a gall bladder meridian despite lacking a gall bladder.
Chi, the nonexistent life force, is found in all living creatures. Even bacteria:
Chi sites serve as stimulators of DNA double-strand break repair in bacteria, which can arise from radiation or chemical treatments, or result from replication fork breakage during DNA replication.
Oops. Wrong chi. If qi, then I can’t find where micro-organisms are credited with the ‘energy’. And who knows with prions and viri. But our pets have qi and so are amenable to acupuncture.
As an unrelated rat hole I went down whether plants have their own types of qi. Yep. It helps determine what plants are used in feng shui.
There are a few trials of acupuncture in plants that allegedly increase yield, although I can find no articles on treating plant diseases. Plants have a meridian system that is not in the nervous, lymphatic or blood systems, since plants lack the structures. So they have been looking for meridians in all the wrong places. Instead,
Some argue that it belongs to nervous system, some believe it is part of lymphatic or blood vessel system. There is no conclusion so far. If plants also have energy channel system, can we start our research on energy channels at the common structures shared by human bodies and plants?
Common structures? Such as? Unless we are studying Swamp Thing.
I did find one news report on acupuncture on fish. It supports my contention that acupuncturissts just make it up as they go along:
In human beings, the treatment to stimulate the body’s immune system involves three points, said Wu, who has been practicing acupuncture for more than 12 years. The first, on the shin, about three inches below the kneecap, is called zu san li, or three measures of the leg.
The problem, of course, is that fish have no shins. So, Wu picked a spot near the fish’s tail and hoped for the best.
Anyway, back to the Oregonian. As discussed in TNTC articles on this blog, there is no reason to suspect acupuncture is effective for any pathologic process, since it is based on fiction. Same is true in animals:
On the basis of the findings of this systematic review, there is no compelling evidence to recommend or reject acupuncture for any condition in domestic animals.
So just how as acupuncture gone mainstream in animals? Let’s see what they have to say.
There are two schools of thought about veterinary acupuncture. The original form of acupuncture, which has been practiced for thousands of years, follows principles of traditional Chinese medicine. It views the patient through a lens of five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water.
AKA a school detached from reality.
Each element is associated with a different type of energy. Practitioners work to maintain balance between those energies, which they believe is essential for a healthy body to function.
Well, that tells me nothing. How that lens is applied to animals? Can’t say. And no mention of qi or meridians, so fundamental fictional underpinnings of TCPM are not mentioned. So, really, two paragraphs that have no explanatory content.
In traditional Chinese pseudo-medicine, the fake diagnosis is made by examining the tongue and the pulse. Is that done with animals? You betcha:
The pulse is assessed in various locations, depending on species. Cats, dogs, goats, and sheep have their femoral pulses checked. Equine pulses are palpated using the common carotid at the base of the neck or external maxillary artery, while the ventral tail (median caudal artery) is assessed in the bovine.
The tongue diagnosis would be easy with our old English bull dog.
Another approach focuses on anatomical effects on the body. Practitioners place needles to achieve specific effects by stimulating muscles or nerves.
OK. That sounds semi-reasonable, although
Both versions of acupuncture can help veterinary patients.
How? Don’t know. But let’s read on.
They mention there is also electroacupuncture and that it is more effective. I remain of the opinion that once you apply electricity, it is no longer acupuncture. It is just modified TENS and the effects are due to the electricity and have nothing to do with the needles or any aspect of acupuncture.
Then there is the only article quoted in support of acupuncture. So effective, it is quoted twice.
Herniated disks can be very painful for animals. A 2023 study found that when dogs with this condition were treated with acupuncture, nearly 80% recovered, compared with 60% of animals whose cases were managed conservatively without acupuncture.
Well. It was a retrospective study of 94 dogs over 6 years. The 60%? Historical controls. They do not define recovery but note for historical controls
Considering the differences in defining recovery among different studies, it was expected that the recovery rate in this study would be slightly lower than those in the previous reports. For example, some studies considered successful treatment as an occasional ability to stand or walk independently.
And how were the acupuncture points chosen?
According to TCM pathogenesis, the main cause of TL-IVDH is the obstruction of pelvic Tai-yang Bladder and the Du Channel due to the deficiency of Kidney Qi and the invasion of external pathogens. Therefore, acupuncture treatment aims to increase blood circulation, remove blood stasis and tonify Liver and Kidney.
Gibberish.
Crap study and I think misrepresented by the author, who to my reading implies this as a comparative treatment trial. Twice.
Acupuncture and electroacupuncture both increase the body’s levels of compounds called endogenous opioids. These are pain-relieving substances that the body produces naturally. They work similarly to pharmaceutical opioids, such as fentanyl and morphine.
So acupuncture inflicts pain and increases endogenous opioids. A destroy the village to save it situation.
Acupuncture increases these compounds so dramatically that the effect can be reversed with opioid antidotes, such as Narcan.
I could not find the article to support that statement. Instead I found mostly the opposite:
This does not support the hypothesis that acupuncture therapy is mediated by endorphin.
and
In an attempt to replicate a study by D. J. Mayer et al. (see record 1977-23009-001), 14 university students and staff who demonstrated acupunctural analgesia during electrical stimulation of the LI-4 point on the hands received either 1.2 mg naloxone or saline under double-blind conditions. Pain thresholds elevated by acupuncture failed to reverse when naloxone was given. Review of experimental design issues, other related human Ss research, and animal studies on acupunctural analgesia provided little convincing evidence that endorphins play a significant role in acupunctural analgesia
At this point in the article, I am not convinced the author is reliable when reporting the literature if it contradicts his belief in the efficacy of acupuncture and misrepresents the articles that do. References sure would be nice to know for sure. Lack of references is the most problematic aspect of articles in the Life section of the paper
Studies in small animal medicine show that using acupuncture can speed up healing from nerve injuries, such as spinal cord damage from herniated disks.
One very small study in rats to support the effect median nerve damage , but, like for herniated discs, it was ELECTROacupuncture, and so the effects were likely from the electricity not the acupuncture. I still think passing off electroacupuncture as acupuncture is at best disingenuous.
They continue
Acupuncture can also make other techniques, such as epidural nerve blocks, more effective when both methods are used together.
I can’t find the reference to support this assertion. This maybe? Or this? Neither, really. The statement is too ill-defined to know. But neither study used fake acupuncture as a control and both came from China, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the acupuncture studies are above average, aka positive. So color me unimpressed.
Many vets are using acupuncture creatively for other purposes, such as increasing sick animals’ appetites, improving their digestion and accelerating healing from injuries.
For appetite, perhaps but multiple forms of acupuncture were used as well as different acupoints, suggesting that any effect would be nonspecific. Also
Although the majority of reviewed studies reported positive effects, several methodological limitations must be acknowledged. Sample sizes were often small, blinding was inconsistently applied, and few studies included long-term follow-up data. Moreover, heterogeneity in acupuncture techniques(manual) vs. electroacupuncture), acupoint combinations, and treatment duration complicates direct comparisons (Li et al., 2022). Standardization of acupuncture protocols is thus essential to improve reproducibility and facilitate clinical translation. Additionally, while hormonal assays were commonly used, behavioral assessments of appetite—such as feed approach latency or chewing time—were less frequently reported, limiting holistic interpretation of outcomes.
I did not have access to many of the articles in the review. For example, Appetite response to auricular acupuncture in broilers from Poultry Integrative Medicine, 3(1), 22–28. Chickens have ears? Yep. Small ones. But I would love to know how this was done and, given the relative size of human fingers and chicken ears, how they managed to not activate every acupoint at once. I guess they just squeezed the head. Much to my surprise, there are no videos on the interwebs showing chicken auricular acupuncture. I knew I should not have let my subscription to Poultry Integrative Medicine lapse.
Improving digestion? Not certain what that means, but using it as a search term yields nothing of note.
Healing from injuries? What does that refer to? Wound? Fracture? Bruise? Sore muscle? Too vague for a search. Given that the better the study, the less acupuncture effect in humans, I would suppose the same would be true in animals. As has been noted over and over here at SBM, acupuncture does nothing,
They proceed to say how they use acupuncture, and sometime electoecupuncture, at the University of Tennessee:
Our practice at the University of Tennessee has used acupuncture most extensively to help rehabilitate animals recovering from conditions like radial nerve paralysis and femoral nerve injury. We can use acupuncture to stimulate muscles or to provide pain relief, either by itself or combined with other therapies.
Also used to prevent muscle atrophy, treat spinal inflammation in goats (Jordan or James?), and osteoarthritis in llamas and alpacas.
We use acupuncture and electroacupuncture to stimulate the goats’ large and accessory spinal nerves and the muscles in the animals’ legs and backs. This gives the goats more muscle function when the inflammation clears, and we believe it helps reduce their pain.
Poor goats. In pain and caregivers believe they are not hurting. Who knows?
If there is a nerve or muscle involved, there is probably a veterinary treatment option using acupuncture or electroacupuncture. New studies regularly add to our understanding of the neurology and biochemistry that underlie these therapies.
New studies tend to be crap and add little to nothing. 50 years and still no one can show acupuncture’s efficacy in quality studies, as repeatedly documented in this blog.
If your vet recommends acupuncture for a dog or cat — especially for chronic pain — you can be confident that it’s not a fringe treatment. As long as the person treating your pet is a licensed veterinarian, and is certified by a professional organization like Curacore, Chi University or the American Academy of Veterinary Acupuncture, acupuncture should make your pet more comfortable and improve its quality of life.
Nope. Not fringe. Unfortunately. Just a useless waste of time and money and your dog will get the added suffering of being needled. Probably my bias, but photos of dogs with acupuncture needles look like they are unhappy.
It is why I am skeptical of the information in the Life section. No rigor and none of the fact checking of the News section. Except Dear Abby, of course. She is always spot on.
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Mark Crislip
Mark Crislip, MD has been a practicing Infectious Disease specialist in Portland, Oregon, from 1990 to 2023. He has been voted a US News and World Report best US doctor, best ID doctor in Portland Magazine multiple times, has multiple teaching awards and, most importantly, the ‘Attending Most Likely To Tell It Like It Is’ by the medical residents at his hospital.
His multi-media empire can be found at edgydoc.com.
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Posted in:
Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Veterinary medicine
Tagged in:
acupuncture, animal acupuncture, Inuit, traditional Chinese medicine, whale
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