I’ve had many questions come through this site through both comments emails asking whether or not dog knee braces work for securing the stifle (knee) joint after a cruciate ligament tear. From a vetrinary standpoint, there are pros and cons to wearing the knee brace.

Pros of using a dog knee brace:

• Huge savings in cost
• You obviously aren’t going to put the dog under for surgery, this is always a risk

Cons of using a dog knee brace:

• The knee brace will not actually help to repair the torn cruciate ligament. Once torn, a ligament will need some sort of surgical procedure in order to be fixed
• Could further damage the knee/stifle joint by not repairing it

At the end of the day, all the knee brace will do is provide the stifle joint stability that would otherwise not be there. That and make your dog look silly. Just kidding, trying to keep a little humor, I know how hard it is when your dog suffers an injury and loss of mobility. When weighing the options of using a knee brace for your dogs torn cruciate, its best to consult your veterinarian and discuss your dogs lifestyle. Is your dog active? will you be able to restrain your dog? Is your dog overweight? Is your dog old or young? Does your dog have any other health problems? There are a ton of issues that should be considered prior to making the decision to use a knee brace over surgery.

My recommendation: If your dog has a lot of years ahead of it, go the surgery route. If you’re unable to afford surgery for your dog, maybe use a brace in the interim as you save for surgery.

Related Posts

• Canine Knee Surgery on Both Knees at the Same Time
• Cruciate Ligament in Dogs, Canine Cranial Cruciate Ligament (Crucial)
• A Majority of Canine Injuries Occur on the Weekend – Here’s the Reason Why

When it comes to purchasing just about anything, you’re almost always able to find a better price online that you’d be able to find on the same product in a local store or from a big retailer. A large part of this reason is that online resellers aren’t having to carry and pay for the overhead cost of having a storefront. By leasing warehouse space rather than storefront or commercial real estate space, stores and their owners are potentially saving half of their monthly rent/lease payment. Online resellers typically don’t operate from a storefront or commercial space, they are typically operating from smaller warehouse spaces, thus they are saving large amounts of money on their rental and/or lease payments, and they are in-turn able to pass some of these savings onto their customers by offering the same products as large retailers at lower prices.

Your veterinarian may be able to match some online prices (if they sell the product that you’re looking for). Typically, veterinarians are going to sell items at full retail price, so if you find a lower price online and print it out and take it in, some vets might be willing to match the price in order not to miss out on the sale. It’s basically going to come down to their bottom line. Your vet might not sell large quantities (like an online retailer may), so they might not have the buying power of a large online retailer, meaning that a large online retailer gets product at 50% off, and the smaller local vet may only get product at 30% off. So in the example below, the vet wouldn’t even be able to offer the same price because they’d be losing money by making the sale.

For example, lets look at Frontline Plus flea and tick medicine for dogs – we’ll look at the 3 pack for dogs that are 45-88 pounds.

• $51.99 – Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price
• $33.99 – Frontline Plus at Amazon (3 pack)

Here’s the same pricing info for the 6 pack:

• $99.99 – Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price
• $65.99 -Frontline Plus at Amazon (6 pack)

Amazon offers the 6 pack of Frontline Plus at an approximate 35% discount.

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• Save Money by Ordering Pet Medications Online for a Dog Knee Injury
• The Use of Supplements for Conservative Management Rather Than Medications

When your dog tears its cranial cruciate ligament, that is bad news in itself, but what do you do when your dog ruptures both CCLs at the same time? How do you care for the dog? How do you decide what type of surgery to treat it? How do you afford it? Do you have the surgical procedure on both legs at the same time, or do you do one knee, let it recover, then do the other knee? These are all tough questions, and I’ll be the first to admit, we were a bit overwhelmed when our dog first ruptured her CCL, but hopefully the information here on this page will help out for those rare cases when pets rupture both knee ligaments at the same time.

The first step to take if your dog is diagnosed with 2 torn knee ligaments would be restriction. When I say restriction, I mean putting the dog in some sort of crate or pen that will drastically restrict movement. You don’t want the dog to have room to run and jump as sad as that is to say. While confined, icing the dogs knees can help reduce swelling and inflammation – if your dog will actually let you apply ice.

As the dog is confined, you’ll be left with some more questions to answer – Should we have both knees repaired at the same time, or should we do one, let it recover completely and then do the other. And then the next obvious question that comes after that is, can we afford it? I’ll address these questions together because they can tie directly into one another. We’ll look at these questions considering 2 cases. Case 1 – We get both knees operated on at the same time, and, Case 2 – We get one knee operated on, then wait for it to heal and then get the second knee operated on.

Option 1 – Repair both CCLs at the same time
I’m calling this option 1 because I think that this option will be the all around best option for both the dog and the owner(s). In terms of time commitment, this option will require less time because the knees will be recovering together, rather than waiting for one to recover, then waiting for the other. This option, though drastic, will be less harsh on the dog. With this option, the dog will only be required to be confined for 2-5 months (depending on the type of surgery, the veterinarians recommendations, etc.). This will essentially equate to half of the time as the other option. And the final reason that I think this is the better option is that there is greater potential for savings. If both knees are operated on at the same time, chance are you’ll be able to talk your vet into doing 2 for 1, or at least the second at a 50% discount.

Option 2 – Repair one knee at a time
With this option, you’ll be looking at strict confinement not just once, but twice. This was one of the hardest things when our dog had her knee surgery. There are many things that could come into play when deciding which option is best, age, activity level, attitude, etc, but if you have an active dog, I think that repairing one knee at a time would be absolute torture because it would lengthen the amount of time that the dog is penned up in a confined space. Though the possibility is there, I don’t believe the potential for savings is quite as large in this instance, because by spreading the surgeries out by 3-5 months, you’re in essence taking your dog back for an entirely separate surgery, and the veterinarian will probably want to bill you as such. It’s always worth trying to negotiate the price down a bit, but I would anticipate that the vet would be less willing to cut the price in this instance.

As terrible as this situation would be, it does happen, so I hope that this information helps in making decisions about how to treat a dog who does encounter a dual CCL rupture.

Related Posts

• Our Golden Retriever Bailey and Repairing Both Knees at the Same Time
• Cruciate Ligament in Dogs, Canine Cranial Cruciate Ligament (Crucial)
• Canine Cruciate Brace – Will a Knee Brace Help My Dog?

One of the most difficult things we faced with our dogs knee injury was that cost. Obviously, the cost of surgery was a huge burden, especially due to the fact that it came at a time that was unexpected, as most torn CCL’s and other knee injuries do. After the initial cost of surgery, we thorugh we were in the clear, but we hadn’t even taken into account the cost of medications after the surgery. Buying all of the pills and medicines for our dog directly from our veterinarian became very pricy. After doing a little research online, we found that there were plenty of online stores that offered the same medications at a fraction of the cost of what we were paying our veterinarian for the same medicine. This realy was a no-brainer for us – we needed to save money, so we decided that we’d start ordering the medications online.

Come to find out, pet medications are treated as controlled substances (just as drugs and medications are treated for you and I) – you need a prescription in order to place an order for pet medicines online. Now this is a slippery slope, and I’ll address this issue in a later blog post (How do you tell your vet that you want to buy your medications from another source). If you want to order your pet medications online, you’ll need to ask your veterinarian for a prescription, and as I mentioned before, that could put you in a tough place because the veterinarian obviously just performed a huge surgery on your pet then you (in a way) tell them that you want to go elsewhere.  There is a way to keep both parties happy, you’ll just need to use some creative thinking. I’ll explore that a little bit more in a later post.

Image by Darren Hester.

Related Posts

• Save Money On Pet Medications by Asking Your Veterinarian to Match an Online Price
• Cost of Repairing a Torn ACL/CCL Injury in a Dogs Knee
• Diagnosing a Cranial Cruciate Ligament (CCL) Injury