Modern therapies for patients with chronic pain

This episode of The Vet Blast Podcast presented by dvm360 is sponsored by Zomedica.

During this live podcast recording from dvm360’s Fetch Kansas City conference, our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, welcomes special guest Nicole Westfall, MBA, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Zomedica, to the show. They discuss PulseVet Shock Wave Therapy, The Assisi Loop, and how both products offer noninvasive pain management options for patients with chronic pain.

Throughout the episode, Westfall and Christman take a deep dive into how each product works, their clinical benefits, and a walkthrough of what at-home sessions look like for clients.

Below is a partial transcript, edited lightly for clarity.

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: And how many minutes per session? And how many do you get out of a loop?

Nicole Westfall, MBA: Sure. So the loop is 15 minutes per session. Again, all you do is turn it on, the lights go on, and then it goes off when it's done, you get 150 treatments out of each loop. And then the [Loop Lounge], you actually get over 6000 treatments, which is fantastic, right? And it too, is 15 minutes, and all you do is turn it on.

Christman: And the research has been in the human literature for many years, and then started coming over to the veterinary space, right?

Westfall: Yeah, the Assisi products were really started in the human field, and then with the founders of Assisi, they worked on those products and then adapted it to the pet space. And so then we have a couple of great studies, one by [Leilani Alvarez, DVM, DACVSMR] who I think is your keynote coming up from AMC, and a couple of other ones in the animal space. But then there's a ton in the human space.

Christman: Yeah, there really is a ton in human space. So using that coupling that with shock wave therapy, what are some trends that you're seeing going forward when we're looking at multimodal pain management?

Westfall: Well, we're really seeing that pet owners don't want to drug their dogs every day if they don't have to. It's expensive, it's hard to do. I mean, I'm sure you can tell me more on that. So we're seeing that they want to do non invasive treatment therapies, right? And so doing coupling shock wave and the Assisi Loop is an easy way to do that, because unlike some of the other non invasive therapies, they don't have to come quite as often. For shock wave, right? It's 1-3 treatments, depending on what the vet recommends.

And then the Assisi loop is so easy to do at home, it's really minimal effort, and they're loving that, and they're not having to use nearly as many NSAIDs or things like that that could harm the pets on the inside.