Evidence-based Research Increases Clients

Mary Ellen Goldberg, BS, LVT, CVT, SRA, CCRA, certified veterinary pain practitioner with VetMedTeam, LLC., expresses the necessity of having evidence-based research to have more clients buy into your physical rehabilitation program.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“When you want the owner to buy into your program, when you want the owner to be participating in the program, I think one of the big things to do is to get evidence-based research. I’ve written several articles on obesity and I can say that there’s evidence-based research out there. One of them, Veterinary Clinics of North America, January 2015, small animal practice, has an entire rehabilitation issue. There’s one specific chapter devoted to evidence-based medicine. They talk about pain and what they talk about, and they use articles to say this is proven that this works. Same thing for obesity.

You want articles that are going to show obesity is detrimental. Obesity generally takes 2.5 years off the animal’s life. If you love your pet and you want your pet around with you for as long as possible, you’re killing your pet with kindness by overfeeding it. Obesity increases the risk of, as I stated, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, osteoarthritis, diabetes, these animals are predisposed to things, hepatic lipidosis for cats, different hormonal issues for dogs and cats—they are predisposed to these things because of being obese.

There are evidence-based papers out there, and if you can have these and jot down little things that it’s been proven that this is what helps, it’s been proven that this allows your animal to live longer, it’s been proven that diabetic cats—if they’re obese and they lose weight—they’re not diabetic any longer, it’s been proven that osteoarthritic patients—if they lose weight—they can come off medication because they’re no longer painful, and maybe not all medication, but as many medications multi-modally that you want to give to them. And so, there are huge benefits from losing weight for the pet and keeping the pet with the owner longer, and that’s how I try to get them to understand the importance of losing weight to not be obese, and then maintaining their weight to not be obese.”