Pin the dog with needles!

HONG KONG: When five-year-old Ahsi is led into the vet’s clinic in Hong Kong, he’s in a foul mood, and he proclaims this with a succession of loud yips and snarls. He’s been a bit of a bad dog, says his owner Kaykay: “last night, Ahsi bit my father rather badly when he tried to stroke him.”

Fortunately for Kaykay, Dr Susie Lam knows exactly how to handle dogs with anger management problems: by pinning needles into them!

Call the SPCA, you say? Well, this is the SPCA Hong Kong. And Lam’s regimen isn’t some form of canine torture technique, it’s a centuries-old Chinese medical science procedure that’s been revived at Hong Kong’s first acupuncture clinic for pets. 

“Acupuncture can be used to treat a variety of conditions in animals,” says Lam, who treats dogs, cats and rabbits – and even retired racehorses. “Typically, these are musculo-skeletal problems, cardio-vascular problems, arthritis, paralysis, urinary tract infections, and even behavioural problems.”

To diagnose whether Ahsi’s short temper is symptomatic of some deeper malaise, Lam must read his pulse. But since Ahsi, a cross between a Pekinese and a Shih Tzu, doesn’t have a convenient artery that will reveal medical information about his other organs, this must be done ‘remotely’. “What I do is this,” says Lam, “I check my pulse, and move my hand over Ahsi’s body parts. The quality of my pulse changes if there’s a problem with that particular organ.”

Today’s pulse-check reveals that Ahsi’s liver is acting up, which explains why he’s extraordinarily nippy. In the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) system, the liver, which regulates bile secretion, controls moods, and an energy imbalance leads to irritability. 

“Ahsi’s liver is his weak spot,” says Lam, who’s been treating him for two years now – for a far more serious condition than just canine irritability. When Ahsi first came to see her, his hind legs were paralysed by a painful intervertebral disc disease, and he couldn’t walk at all. After first consulting Western allopathic doctors, who recommended expensive surgery, Kaykay had turned to Lam. Thanks to her acupuncture regimen, which was also far more affordable, Ahsi began to walk again, and is generally much more cheerful, says Kaykay.

Lam says there are instances when pets have found a cure with acupuncture for conditions where Western medicine system offered no hope. For instance, she recalls, a cat with end-stage renal failure came to her when other doctors had recommended that she be put down. Treated with acupuncture, the cat lived for two more years.  

The diagnosis having been done, it’s time for Ahsi’s treatment. The needles come out – about 20 of them – and as Kaykay muzzles Ahsi, Lam gingerly pins them on the dog’s hind legs and back. A particularly painful spot – his liver pressure point, notes Lam – has Ahsi snarling momentarily, but he’s calmed soon enough. 

For 15 minutes, Ahsi sits there with his needles, looking more like a dartboard than a dog. And at the end of it, when the needles come off, he is sweetness personified, and even gives Lam a friendly lick. 

Thanks to the jabs that cure, Ahsi’s liver function has been restored to normalcy, and all’s well in his canine world.