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Severe Hip Arthritis
This is a quick little note about a rarely employed technique in Australia for dealing with severe hip arthritis. As with most orthopaedic problems, there is a long list of measures for helping hip arthritis. There are various agents used for encouraging restoration of cartilage, from food additives to injectables. Pentosan sulphate is almost certainly the best, and has been clinically trialled in humans too with good results. You can use long term pain killers which aren't necessarily “stronger”, just more specific with reduced side effects than say aspirin.
Tramadol and gabapentin are more the pain killers that work on the brain than the pain receptor nerves, and they too can be very useful. After medication comes surgery. In smaller dogs, hip pain can be resolved by actually removing the joint. The head and neck of the femur can be removed and some care taken to get the remnants off the shaft of the femur to avoid grinding effects against the pelvis. Sounds drastic but remember the front legs in dogs and cats take 65% of the weight of the body and are just held by muscle, not bone, so a rear leg shoulder joint can work pretty well, but only for cats and dogs under 17 kg.
Then there are the excellent results associated with hip replacement. There are some procedures that are specialist only though. The rule of thumb in surgery is until you have done it 50 times, you can't be trusted. And only specialist surgeons get anywhere near these sorts of numbers. Besides which we generalist aren't going to pretend we can do it or afford the capital outlay required to even be able to get the job done. Not if you do three a year.
Now, there is a procedure which you don't need to do 50 times to be competent, and I have to say a lot of specialists will give it the thumbs down, though I doubt many have even tried it. Except in Germany where this took off, and has been well documented. Trouble is, most of us don't read German journals. There is a surgical expert in Melbourne though called Dr Wing Tip Wong who is promoting this method called denervation.
It's very simple. You just go between a couple of muscles on the pelvic wing and in 3 locations scrape the area of the bone around the hip joint to uncouple the nerve endings that transmit the howls of pain from the run-down arthritic hip joints. It takes a few minutes on each side. I have just started doing them, in a combined project with a veterinary colleague at Tuggerah Vets, Vicky Onus. The early results are surprisingly good. This isn't a perfect substitute for hip replacement surgery, but it may be better than giving up.