Certified animal chiropractic

These past few weeks have been busy seeing horses at the peak of show season. Oftentimes I get asked how does someone become an animal chiropractor? The first step to enroll in an animal chiropractic program is that the individual has to be a licensed chiropractor or veterinarian. From there, there’s a few post graduate programs to choose from that are spread across the country. The program that interested me the most was the Healing Oasis in Sturtevant, Wisconsin. (This is right next to Racine, WI where there’s a well known Kringle bakery).

The Healing Oasis is the only certified animal chiropractic program in the country. It is a well rounded program because students are certified to adjust both large animals like horses and cows as well as small animals like dogs and cats. Some animal chiropractic programs ask the students to pick to focus on large or small animals. The Healing Oasis program is 226 hours of classroom and hands-on clinical experiences spread out over 5 months. To me, the most overwhelming part was learning all the animal anatomy. Humans and animals are vastly different in that humans are bipedal (we walk on two legs) while the animals that we learned about were all quadruped (walk on four legs). This makes a lot of the muscles’ names different as well as their insertion and attachment points. As far as learning how to correctly adjust an animal, once I learned differences between the neuroanatomy and the biomechanics of how the spines of animals with four legs move versus humans, the actual adjusting came very easy. The veterinarians in our class had the opposite experience. The anatomy came very easy to them but the palpation of joints, speed, and angle of the adjustment were more challenging. 

I’m so grateful for the teachers I had at Healing Oasis and still keep in contact with them. They continue to be an amazing resource for complex cases that I come across. Some of the more common reasons large and small animals get adjusted is that the owner notices the animal is in pain. Sometimes it’s more subtle like the animal is holding its head down more frequently or they’re holding their tail to one side. Sometimes owners and animals who perform in agility or barrel racing or other sports like to get adjusted because their body experiences more wear and tear and they want to keep the joints moving properly. Whatever the case, I love meeting your furry friends! ​