An awareness campaign about osteoarthritis in dogs has seen four out of the 10 iPad prizes offered nationally to vets and participating dog owners won by Armidale vets and pet owners.
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Doctors Emma Billing and Lucy Ducat from New England Veterinary Services last year undertook a program of inviting customers to bring their pets in to take up a short term of treatment and take short videos of their dogs before and after and see the results.
Dr Billing said taking out the prizes did not seen that difficult.
"We have really good clients who just wanted to participate in the program. They were pretty open to it actually," she said.
"I've learnt that you can treat arthritis very well with newer generation medications that have fewer side effects.
"The owners can see the improvement, but I think the biggest winner is the animal that lives a happier life. Bothan was quite an exceptional response, but he's such a happier dog after that."
Territory manager from Boehringer Ingelheim Laurence Price, which ran the campaign said it was literally a clean sweep for Armidale.
"As an incentive for veterinarians we offered five iPads nationally, and for the pets owners five iPads nationally. Little old NEVS won two out of the five for the vets and two out of the five for the pet owners," he said.
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"In my position, I have 200 veterinary clinics and to get one winner is outstanding, but to almost clean sweep is almost unheard of.
"Just to put this into perspective, you were also up against those large multi-vet practices in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and also the specialist centres. So, this has never happened before."
Mr Price said the results from this campaign would be fed into a study which would be than fed back into the field.
"Doctors Ducat and Billing will get a copies of this study and feed it back to the pet owners and probably engage on Facebook," he said.
"Because the reality is that pet owners need to know that if their dogs are sore, it's just not cute and old, it is a treatable disease and it will give them quality of life back."