Acupuncture questions!

I've never had acupuncture but Winston has arthritis in his spine, and it has been suggested that acupuncture might help. Through Petplan he has an additional £750 for complementary therapy, on top of the £2000 standard amount, which covers acupuncture, hooray!

I have a lot of questions :lol:

I've read that it's often best to do it weekly for 4-6 weeks initially. How long does a session usually take? Do they have to keep the rabbit still or restrain it? It seems like people have reported their bunny not being stressed by it, has that been the same in your experience? Anything else I'm missing that I may not have thought of?

yaretzi said:

I've never had acupuncture but Winston has arthritis in his spine, and it has been suggested that acupuncture might help. Through Petplan he has an additional £750 for complementary therapy, on top of the £2000 standard amount, which covers acupuncture, hooray!

I have a lot of questions :lol:

I've read that it's often best to do it weekly for 4-6 weeks initially. How long does a session usually take? Do they have to keep the rabbit still or restrain it? It seems like people have reported their bunny not being stressed by it, has that been the same in your experience? Anything else I'm missing that I may not have thought of?

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The Rabbits I have had who have received Acupuncture had weekly sessions. I cant remember exactly how many sessions each Rabbit had but it was a few. The only 'restraint' was me holding them as they sat on the examination table (they were facing me so could not jump off). The needles are put in which takes a few minutes. Then we (me and Bunny) went and sat in a quiet side room for about half an hour until all the needles had done their stuff (they bend a bit). The needles are then removed and that's the session done. I have only had one Rabbit who could not cope with Acupuncture, she was a mega stressy Rabbit in a lot of pain that heavy duty analgesia was not fully on top of.

I would definitely give Acupuncture a try to see if it is a suitable option for Winston.

yaretzi said:

I've never had acupuncture but Winston has arthritis in his spine, and it has been suggested that acupuncture might help. Through Petplan he has an additional £750 for complementary therapy, on top of the £2000 standard amount, which covers acupuncture, hooray!

I have a lot of questions :lol:

I've read that it's often best to do it weekly for 4-6 weeks initially. How long does a session usually take? Do they have to keep the rabbit still or restrain it? It seems like people have reported their bunny not being stressed by it, has that been the same in your experience? Anything else I'm missing that I may not have thought of?

Click to expand...

My vet recommends six sessions of acupuncture and reckons they've had amazing results

Yes it was also weekly

My cats have acupuncture for arthritis and it works wonders. Delilah has also had acupuncture around her persistent myxo nodule. After 4 months of doing nothing, it fell off after just 4 acupuncture sessions!

Different vets do seem to have very different techniques - in my experience a session is about 20 minutes in total. Some of them will put a load of needles in at the same time along the meridians and leave them, others will feel for specific trigger points and will focus their needling on those, only using about 2 or 3 needles at a time and focusing on those for a few minutes before taking them out when the muscles release. My cats have had both types and respond significantly better to the latter, but I guess every patient is different. It does seem to be one of those things that you start off fairly frequent and then taper it down over time. So weekly for the first month, then fortnightly, then every 3 weeks, then monthly, then once they're stable, pretty much as and when needed. My cats now go about every 6 weeks depending on the time of year. Once you get into the swing of it you can see when they need to pop back for another session.

Again with the cats, at first it can make them appear a bit worse, because as the needles free up some of the knotted muscle, their posture changes and it can have a bit of a knock-on effect a bit further along the body - I think this is probably one of the reasons why it needs to be done more frequently at first until it's fairly stable. One of my cats is a strong responder, presumably the endorphin release is high, she gets the munchies when she gets home and will eat about 2 days worth of food in the space of a couple of hours :lol:

I wouldn't have thought bunny would need restraining as such. They'll need to sit fairly still on the table but it doesn't seem to bother them so they'll probably be fine. I'm not all that convinced that the cats can feel the needles at all apart from when they go into the really sore points. The vet I see says she has had really good results using acupuncture on rabbit arthritis, so good luck and I hope it works for Winston