Cold laser therapy

Hello! My cat suffers from chronic joint innflamation, due to a traumatic bone break. I read a bit online and I would like to consult about home laser thearpy (cold laser) (like be cure laser) that I saw had great results. Is it safe to use? Anything I need to pay attantion to? Thank you. Lipaz

Hello - As I understand it, the principle behind laser therapy is to cause local vasodilation (relaxing of small blood vessels to allow more blood through) and thus increase blood-flow to an area.  It may thereby increase the flow of Oxygen, cytokines, healing factors etc to that area (which must be quite superficial for it to work - as joints in cats are).  However, it also may not.  Veterinary medicine, like human medicine, has to be based on evidence.  We are not allowed to recommend a medication if it hasn't been tested on a number of individuals in a controlled study.  'Controlled,' in this context, means that one group of animals is given the medication and another group isn't; that everything else in the patients' treatment plan is kept the same and that the treatment group show a marked improvement over the non-treatment group.  In the UK, a drug simply wouldn't be licensed had it not been shown to work in animals of that particular species.  Our prescribing rules have recently been tightened up so that tested, licensed products are used first.   Adjunctive therapies (acupuncture, cold water, cold laser therapy) have no such legal regulation.  I have never seen a scientific paper supporting the use of cold laser therapy in helping fractures to heal in cats.  If someone can recommend such a paper, please send it along - I haven't been to the source material in this area so if there is something new, I would be delighted to read it - but for the moment I cannot support its use.  The trouble with the internet is, that I could set up a website tomorrow making fantastic claims about an invented treatment; I am a writer as well as a vet and could phrase my writing very convincingly, using scientific terms and assertive language.  For a lot of complementary therapy websites, these claims are then followed up with a list of papers - and frequently owners do not check the papers to see whether the studies done were actually relevant (were they in the same illness, the same species of animal, for example?  Did they actually convincingly suggest an improvement?) so running an eye down the list and saying 'there are lots of studies' is never really enough. We are trained to assess the evidence and then to use the most convincing available methods to treat your pet.  In reality, GP vets can't spend half an hour in the library for every patient / case that we see, so when we aren't sure, we often ask senior vets or a specialist in a field what they'd do, or listen to their lectures.  I know of no such veterinary experts advocating cold laser therapy for arthritis at this time.  There is, however, quite an array of established, evidence supported treatment for fractures in cats and for ethical reasons, these options ought always take priority.

You actually asked me about safety; safety is often assessed in terms of risk : benefit.  For example, no drug or procedure is 100% safe, but if only 1% suffer mild complications and 98% patients show an improvement, this sounds to me like a no-brainer in favour of the treatment.  If there is not shown to be a benefit (and there certainly are risks), then I might argue that the proven benefit does not justify minor risks.   The exact risks depend on the patient and how the treatment is administered; how the eyes are protected from lasers, for example, or how the temperature of the lasers is controlled (it has been suggested that hot lasers could heat up metal pins in fractured legs, causing pain, but I have not explored the reference for this (Hungerford, 2019 quoted by Kelly Huitson, 2024 in the veterinary Times; I have not read Hungerford's article in context)).  Your vet should quantify potential risk : benefit before commencing treatment.