MedcoVet CEO interviewed on PetAbility Podcast
What really sets MedcoVet apart from other laser therapy companies is that the pet owner treats at home instead of the clinician treating in the clinic. While this has many benefits (more treatments per week, lower cost per treatment, etc.), it does add new challenges to treating, all of which revolve around bringing the pet owner into the fold.
MedcoVet CEO, Alon Landa, sat down with the pet owner experts at PetAbility Podcast, to talk about laser therapy from a pet owner’s point of view. What are pet owners afraid of? How does a clinician, with years of experience under their belt, explain treatment to a pet owner who’s engaged but not armed with the same knowledge?
Listen HERE for the full podcast:
Below are some key excerpts from the podcast
Is Laser Therapy at Home Safe?
The short answer is very safe, but let me explain. There are 2 kinds and safe, one is “is it safe on your eyes” and the other is “is it safe if you over-treat by 30 seconds”? We designed our device so that it can be used at home without goggles because we know that pet owners are terrified of hurting their pets and even themselves by shining something in their eyes. People hear that lasers can cut through steel and it’s just terrifying to them. So the first thing we did is we submitted to the FDA that our devices are eye safe. The second piece is “how much Advil do you have to take before it’s really bad for you?” So in our case, if you do about 10 times the dosage that we recommend then it’ll start to inhibit healing rather than help but you have to be putting in about 10 to 15 minutes per spot and it’s very tough in many cases to get a dog to sit down that long.
How does Laser Therapy Work?
In your body there’s a process that converts food to energy and you need that energy to do all the feed your muscles, etc. That process has 5 steps and when you get sick, something is blocked in the fourth step. Because you’re not converting food to energy as efficiently your body has less energy to do to do the things that you need to do. Also the body realizes that it needs to fix whatever’s broken so that we can go back to a normal state and sounds the inflammation alarm. What light does is it unblocks that fourth step and your body starts making more more energy again. Again, once the body sees that it’s returning to normal it stops sounding the inflammation alarm and information drops. That’s why when people talk about this [photobiomodulation] the typical things that you see on the outside are up reduction of inflammation and healing.
Luma vs. NSAIDs. Why not just give your dog a pill?
What we’ve seen is that in some cases, pets cannot tolerate medicine…if they’re having all kinds of stomach issues. Most NSAIDs have side effects that make it difficult to tolerate for long term use. For us, what we want to do what’s best for your pet and the best thing that we can do is find a combination of and NSAIDs and light that mitigate some of those side effects. In some cases, pet owners tell us they got medication down to half the dose with light therapy and that’s fantastic because now they can tolerate this forever. The nice thing about light is that there’s no side effects and it just allows you to treat longer term without worrying about having to take it away at some point.
How is Laser Therapy Different for Dogs vs. Cats?
With dogs, you can see [pain] because they’re limping, you can definitely see it in their gait. I wish people would realize how much this could benefit cats because with a cat what you’ll see is more the lack of them going straight from the table to the floor and going from a table to a chair to the floor. So it’s a lot harder to detect, but because they’re smaller light can get to the target tissue so much more easily and they typically would benefit so much from it.
Can you explain what different colors of light do?
Different kinds of light have different amounts of energy in them. Blue light has more energy than green light and green light has more than red light…the problem is because blue light and green light are more energetic they tend to bounce off things more and as a result they don’t penetrate as deeply…so it’s very hard to get blue light to the inside of the knee or into a shoulder. You use red light or infrared light, which can penetrate even more deeply than red light to get to the deeper tissue and that’s why they have that that’s why typically laser therapy is red light and infrared light, because if you want to get into the tissue you want something that penetrates a bit more deeply.
Is all inflammation bad?
And I think we can all that inflammation has its place and is important, but what we’re trying to do is fight the enemy which is chronic long term inflammation. Inflammation is used for healing initially in the acute stages. But if we continually hurt ourselves and roll that angle over again and don’t do anything to address it, i.e. ice rest elevation, laser and the proper exercises, then that’s when it becomes chronic inflammation.
What makes MedcoVet different?
So the idea behind medical that is the most important thing is we treat at home…we realized that there are clinics all over the country and using clinical laser therapy where the pet owner goes into the clinic and that the clinician administers the treatment and the outcomes are great…what we realized is that there’s a couple things can be made better and in doing so everybody’s actually happier…like Kathy was saying it out it helps a lot if you’re treating regularly and it’s really hard if you have an older dog or if you live far away from from the clinic…it’s really hard to get into the clinic 3 times a week 4 times a week. The first thing we wanted to do is create an environment where the pet owner it’s more convenient for the pet owner and it’s much easier for the pet. Second, when we talked to our clinicians, they would much rather spend that time doing things that a pet owner could never do like surgery or underwater treadmill …so we offer [laser therapy] as a service, so the clinician doesn’t have to do anything but the medicine part which is what they went to school for. The idea behind MedcoVet is that we make [laser therapy] better for the pet make it better for the pet owner and then we even make it better for the clinician so that everybody’s happier and we get better outcomes.
Luma
At MedcoVet, we aim to make light therapy available and affordable to anyone that needs it. So, we would like anyone interested, curious, practiced or skeptical to join our community and the discussion.