Any pet may suffer an injury or develop a problematic symptom. Especially those canine athletes who do activities like agility, flyball, herding, etc.

This article applies the Holistic Medical Decision Making (HMDM) protocol to two common scenarios in agility. In both, HMDM was used.

HMDM is a proven method for making sound, scientific and safe decisions for your health-challenged pets. And it works no matter what method you use to treat your pet. Even if you decide to use medications or surgery which can quickly stop symptoms.

However, the goal of your treatment is probably enhancing your pet’s happiness, quality of life and athletic performance. Not just quickly stopping symptoms like lameness or anxiety with drugs.

Clinical experience and hundreds of cases prove that individualizing your pet’s treatment with HMDM is a highly effective method. Rather than just doing the same thing for all pets with similar symptoms.

In brief, the protocol has these 3 simple steps:

1. Your Goal: such as a faster time through the weave poles
2. Your Research: investigating available treatments, their effectiveness and risks : benefits
3. Your Implementation: consult a vet homeopath, chiropractor, do massage, etc. Then evaluate the response to the treatment.

Vitality and Balance Using HMDM in Agility

Two common challenges for dogs that run agility are:

1. Subtle gait abnormalities and weakness,
2. Behaviors like timidity affecting performance.

These can both be reversed by individualizing with the tools of HMDM: by putting symptoms into context and interpreting them holistically.

CASE STUDY: Hitch In The Gait

CASE STUDY: Let’s say that your pup has a slight hitch in her gait and is running the agility course much slower than usual.

• Your HMDM Step 1 – Goal: To improve her speed by resolving the subtle lameness or weakness.
• Your HMDM Step 2 – Research: You remember that many of your friends in your classes use a great chiropractor and have seen how much chiropractic adjustments can help.
• Your Step 3 – Implementation: Start seeing the chiropractor.

Your pup seems much better after each appointment. But even frequent adjustments don’t hold and your pup’s hitch comes back.

Now you repeat the HMDM process.

• Step 1 – Goal: To permanently resolve the lameness.
• Step 2 – Research: You ask for tips from friends or instructors in agility and you learn about potentially useful exercises.
• Step 3 – Implementation: You buy a TotoFit Orbit to start core conditioning or you book an appointment with a physical therapist

Even after strengthening your dog’s core for a few weeks, the lameness keeps returning. Your HMDM goal is still full recovery and you remember that during your research, you learned that homeopathy is another way to help even more.

The energetic imbalance that caused the lameness, to begin with, can be resolved with homeopathy. Homeopathic “fine-tuning” is the ultimate way of individualizing and working with your pet’s body.

You schedule an appointment with a professional homeopath. Your pup runs better on some days, not as great on others, but her BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Appetite and Mood) continues to improve.

Now comes the hardest part of working with your pet’s body. That is using patience and perseverance while your pup heals. It may be a few months before your pup is ready to race through an agility course. But the wait and work are worth it because then your pup wins races like never before and just keeps getting better and better.

CASE STUDY: Confidence Building and Ending Fears

CASE STUDY: One day in class, your friend’s 7-month-old puppy refuses to do the teeter. Every time it bangs down, she jumps, starts shaking and tries to hide. On top of that, she has started peeing submissively when she sees some people and is barking aggressively (fearfully?) at other dogs. Turns out that she had a rabies shot a few weeks earlier. Your friend knows that these are signs of the rabies miasm and asks what you would do. You recommend that she use the HMDM protocol.

HMDM Step 1 – Goal: Resolve the imbalance from the rabies vaccine.

HMDM Step 2 – Research: Your friend is already increasing vitality and healing ability by raw feeding, avoiding toxins and most vaccines and providing lots of physical and mental stimulation in agility.

But that has not been enough. Her pup’s vitality is high, but it is imbalanced. Fortunately, she just saw the great results you had with homeopathy. You tell your friend that homeopathic treatment is a great way to reverse these symptoms. You describe how homeopathy will work with her pup’s natural vitality to help optimize her balance.

HMDM Step 3 – Implementation: She starts working with a veterinary homeopath.

Symptom clues lead to an individualized homeopathic medicine.  After just one dose, your friend’s dog is no longer jumping when she hears the teeter hit the ground!

She still doesn’t want to get on the teeter, but it’s a step in the right direction. Over time and continued treatment, your friend’s dog is finally willing to get on it. The instructor advises your friend to keep the teeter height low at first, but in a few months, it’s back up to the full height.

And the happiness in your friend’s dog’s face when she runs the full course (including the teeter) is wonderful to see! Oh, and the submissive peeing and “greeting dis-order” (barking aggressively at other dogs she sees) also improve.

These are other great effects from optimizing her balance with homeopathy to stop the rabies miasm symptoms. In six months her confidence is restored and she is back to living her life to its fullest.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Quality of life and happiness for our beloved companion animals.