Pets are cuddle fiends. They are attention hounds, quite literally, and all of their time is spent devising ways to retrieve pettings. If our rough hair tussling and soft scratches feel so good, how do you think they would react to medical massage? There is a lot of scientific support that therapeutic touch can have some surprising medicinal applications for pet health. So today we’ll examine some of the reasons you might want to splurge on a doggy day spa.
Weight Loss
Therapeutic touch has all sorts of medicinal effects on pets. Interestingly enough, studies show that superficial rubbing and pressure applied to a pet affects its autonomic nervous system. That is, the unconscious actions a pet’s body performs. Everything from the pumping of its heart tot the contractions of its stomach is positively affected by a touch.
Medical massage can help your pet lose weight by tripping the nerves that signal to the brain that the stomach is full, thereby decreasing appetite. Another way medical massage helps your pet lose weight is by managing insulin levels in its blood stream. It also helps the pet’s stomach digest food more efficiently, by extracting more nutrients and increasing the rate and effectiveness of a pet’s peristalsis, (the movements your intestinal tract makes in order to move food through the digestive system).
It even contributes to the prevention of many digestive and intestinal difficulties. Touch therapy has been shown to decrease an animal’s chances of developing “Leaky Gut Syndrome,” a condition where the seals in between the cell walls of the stomach lining come undone.
Pain Relief
Just as a good rubdown can make you feel like a million bucks, a session of touch therapy for a pet can alleviate their pain. Therapeutic touch can reduce pain in several ways. Simply rubbing out the knots of accrued amino acidic buildup can make a joint more mobile. Releasing that acid helps keep a muscle from retaining tension and becoming sore.
Medical massage can also reduce a pet’s inflammation, which can be a serious cause for concern, depending on the animal’s diet and lifestyle. It can also be good for spinal health, and that’s more important than most people think. Spinal columns transfer virtually every signal that the brain sends, it’s the body’s command superhighway. Incidentally, it’s a good idea to keep it from getting too twisted or tense.
Surgical Rehab
When pets are recovering from surgery, touch therapy is often a required rehabilitation exercise. This is because of its potency at increasing blood flow, and reducing stress. That’s an important element of pet message efficacy that might be easily overlooked. However, if your pet is in pain or under a lot of stress for some reason, a medical massage might do a world of good for both the pet’s mental and physical health.
Pets our most loyal companions and they require a lot of upkeep sometimes. Perhaps the most attractive benefit of medical message for pets is its preventative benefits. So give pet massage a thought every once in a while. You might be saving some hefty medical costs down the line.