AI cannot be the ONLY thing helping your dog or cat's rehabilitation.

The risks, and potential benefits, of using AI to help with your pet's management and rehabilitation.

1.     The ease trades off against the risk

With the right prompts, AI could potentially offer an outline of the rehabilitation plan that could benefit your pets. It can answer basic and even complex questions… When you first get handed the diagnosis for your pet’s injury, there can be a lot of long, complicated words and a lot of emotion. Using AI to quickly decipher and simplify this information and make it accessible to you is immeasurably valuable. This can happen at the tap of a finger, any time of day. Whilst I can help with this, I can’t be available at the touch of the button, and I desperately need my beauty sleep ;)

What AI cannot offer, the factor that is crucial, is the touch-trained feeling that my hands have gained over years of education and work. Rehabilitation is not just about performing exercises and slowly increasing duration and/or intensity to a point of “being fixed”. There are nuances to the exercises, alterations that can and probably need to be made to them, plus setbacks, secondary complications and other constraints that can significantly affect the process. It is not a straightforward trajectory. Furthermore, rehabilitation rarely has a defined “end point”; it become part of an ongoing management process to ensure your pet is safe, comfortable and pain-free for the rest of their lives.

You, as the human using AI to help your pet’s rehab process, are taking on the role of feeling, palpating, massaging, exercising and stretching your pet to aid their recovery. All the AI advice in the world cannot substitute for the training and experience that goes in to doing this in a safe and effective way. The anatomy, the understanding of tissues, the ability to feel the pain and tension in your pet throughout a treatment session is not something that should be taken lightly and is unlikely to be something that most clients are equipped to do. A lot of my clients comment to me how much more at ease their pets are with my handling, or how difficult they find it to perform certain stretches or techniques that I prescribe to them…

Do not forget that you are using AI because your pet has a PAINFUL problem, and handling them in the wrong way, could easily make problems significantly worse.

A Frenchie who suffers locating patellae demonstrating just how far he has come in his rehabilitation and strength work.

2.     Trawling for free information could lead you to a stack of misinformation.

Scanning the web for advice that may help you to get your pet to achieve an outcome is valuable. Many forums, medical experts and veterinary services, among many others, provide a wealth of information with regards to pet injury and health management.

There are 2 risks when trusting AI with this search.

First, is that it is still flawed with the information that it finds and delivers in response to a question. (35% , 45% , 45%). The numbers vary, and the causes of these errors vary. They even have the term “AI hallucinations” to acknowledge the misinformation that AI delivers when it acts “outside of its training”. The information that is found with these programs MUST be verified by a clinically experienced practitioner, for the sake of your pet!

Secondly, AI is unable to assess in real-time the effects that their suggestions may have on your pet, and you likely are not experienced enough to see warning signs either. Part of my initial and ongoing assessments with my patients and clients is monitoring the ease, fatigue and comfort levels shown through sessions.

For some, where exercise is still inappropriate, this is observed during a simple massage and laser session. For others, I watch the early return to exercises – like a basic sit to stand. With each of these, I have a catalogue of experience and observations that mean I can see posture decline with fatigue and can then use that information to adjust the home exercise and rehab plan accordingly. This is to make sure that your gorgeous four-legged family member does not over-do the work and get even more sore or injured secondary to their first problem.

As your chosen veterinary physiotherapist, we are constantly assessing the perceived pain level of your pet, of their movement, of how much those levels have changed since our last appointment, or how that might affect their rehabilitation progress. It happens all the time that a set of exercises that was performed last week with ease, is a major struggle the following week. Changes in many factors contributes to this, factors which are simply intangible to your AI.

3.     You miss out on a human to talk to and to worry about your pet with

This one may seem a bit soft, but it still holds its own.

We are humans and we crave connection.

I get very close to many of my clients and their pets, my patients. Having someone with human feeling forges the human connection and gives you as my clients, and us as humans, a chance to respond to each other.

I share the worry, the excitement, the pride, the sadness, and the joy that comes with the lengthy rehab process. I have been thanked countless times for the love and care I have poured into other peoples’ animals, I have felt the tears when we have been worried about a sudden, serious change in them, and I have smiled with sincere joy watching videos of a senior dog trotting across the beach for the first time in nearly 12 months.

AI will not share that journey with you, and it could be a danger for your pet if you try to.  

True story. This long-term senior client of mine trotted off down the beach recently, for the first time in many months.