Cancer management and early detection in integrative veterinary medicine.

Cancer. It is a word that brings shivers down everyone’s spine. No one wants to find out that their pet has been diagnosed with cancer but up until recently veterinary medicine’s ability to detect cancer’s early has been quite minimal in the standard, integrative, and holistic veterinary practices.

Here, at Arya Animal Acupuncture, we take great care in continuous research of advanced techniques to detect cancer early and support our patients with a positive diagnosis.

PetDx - Freya’s Happy Story

Freya, is an approximately 5 year-old, spayed-female American Staffordshire Terrier. Freya is a rescue, so her exact age is uncertain. Freya presented for a history of progressive/chronic weight loss (she lost 10 pounds in less than 8 weeks) without known cause. After a slew of tests Freya’s pet parents still did not have an answer. While cancer was low on the list of likely diagnoses it was a possibility given Freya’s breed and uncertain age.

This is where PetDx came in! PetDx is a blood test that checks for the presence of circulating cancerous DNA within the pet’s bloodstream. It is the first-ever blood test for cancer detection. Within about 2 weeks of the blood draw Freya’s results were in: she was NEGATIVE for cancer. This allowed Freya’s mom and dad to breathe a sigh of relief and look into other, less concerning, potential diagnoses.

While Freya’s test was negative, had it returned positive, we would have been able to detect the cancer BEFORE it would have spread! This would have allowed Freya’s pet parents to focus their finances in their search of the cause of her weight loss rather than running every test under the sun and wasting finances on things that would have not given them any answers.

Immunotherapy - A Targeted Cancer Treatment

Should Freya have tested positive for cancer and the cancer type was identified Freya’s family had more options than just chemotherapy. Fidocure is a targeted immunotherapy that we partner with to provide less-toxic, more specific treatment for cancer positive patients. Fidocure is effective as an agent to slow down or completely halt the development of cancer in positive canines.

Fidocure analyzes the type of cancer that the pet has and creates a customized oral treatment protocol! The best part is, that it requires a single, one-time payment for the lifetime treatment of the pet regardless of how long the treatment lasts: 6 months, 1 year, 5 years - it doesn’t matter.

Scan-A-Lump

Finding lumps and bumps on our pets is very common: especially as they age. Finding a new lump can be scary! The good news is that we don’t have to fear lumps anymore. We have invested in a scanner called the HT Vista - it is a non-invasive scanner that tells us, within 5 minutes, whether or not a lump may be concerning. No needles! No poking! No pain!

This is a great device as it allows us to check lumps fast, non-invasively, and with no pain. Certain cancers, when agitated with a needle-poke, can actually flare and be triggered to develop faster or cause a severe reaction so being able to detect such cancers is beyond beneficial! How easy is it? As easy as scanning a barcode at the grocery store, and takes only 1 minute.

Our HT Vista scanner is available as of 11/23/22.