Incorporating integrative medicine for maladaptive pain management

Bonnie D. Wright, DVM, DACVAA, CVMA, CVPP, CCRT, CCRP, is a veterinary anesthesiologist and pain specialist and an educator with Evidence-Based Veterinary Acupuncture courses, based in Colorado and Hawaii. Wright recently led 4 continuing education (CE) sessions at the 2026 Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMX) in Orlando, Florida, hosted by the North American Veterinary Community.

In a dvm360 interview recorded during VMX, Wright discussed various ways that acupuncture is used in patient care. In this video, she addresses using this integrative therapy to help manage maladaptive pain.

RELATED ARTICLE: Q&A on utilizing acupuncture in veterinary medicine

The following is a transcript of the video shown:

dvm360: How can acupuncture help manage maladaptive pain?

Bonnie D. Wright DVM, DACVAA: Maladaptive pain is actually where acupuncture stands out more than in the adaptive or acute sort of pain. And it's actually why I learned acupuncture as an anesthesiologist, because I felt like my drug tools weren't helping with maladaptive as much as they were with that acute perioperative pain. So acupuncture is really very helpful at resetting a lot of those neural cascades that took regular pain into maladaptive pain.

With osteoarthritis pain, we get a lot of soft tissue concurrent pain. A lot of times, as we get older, it's actually a lot of that soft tissue pain that is worse than the actual joint pain. So when it's new, osteoarthritis hurts more in the joints. But as it goes on and becomes this chronic condition, it's often the sequela across the soft tissue structures that are more painful. And so acupuncture is quite good at those.

For the joints themselves, the osteoarthritis is that immune balance, but for me, it's more of that chronic stage of osteoarthritis, where acupuncture becomes irreplaceable and very different than all of the drugs we have available.

View more videos from this interview:

• RELATED VIDEO: Aging with acupuncture
• RELATED VIDEO: Providing acupuncture education

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