Bonnie D. Wright, DVM, DACVAA, CVMA, CVPP, CCRT, CCRP, discusses the unique challenges of older patients and how acupuncture can help improve their quality of life.
Bonnie D. Wright, DVM, DACVAA, CVMA, CVPP, CCRT, CCRP, is a veterinary anesthesiologist and pain specialist and an educator with Evidence-Based Veterinary Acupuncture courses, based in Colorado and Hawaii. Wright recently led 4 continuing education (CE) sessions at the 2026 Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMX) in Orlando, Florida, hosted by the North American Veterinary Community. In a dvm360 interview recorded during VMX, Wright discussed her CE session about using acupuncture with aging patients. In this video, she addresses the unique challenges for these patients and how acupuncture can help improve their quality of life.
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The following is a transcript of the video above:
dvm360: How can acupuncture help aging patients with their unique challenges?
Bonnie D. Wright DVM, DACVAA: With aging, one of the conversations we have these days is looking at health span rather than just lifespan. So it’s the idea of ‘how quality is that life,’ not necessarily making it longer, but making it more quality. And in veterinary medicine, that can really relate to making it longer, because then you're less prone to look at humane euthanasia, right?
So acupuncture is really, across the board, a very good treatment for most forms of chronic pain, and with aging, lots of forms of chronic pain can form so almost any sort of organic disease. On top of the ones we know are painful, like osteoarthritis and dental disease and spinal cord disease, but most of the other chronic disease conditions actually do have pain and discomfort, including those of the internal organs. So even just the pain management side of acupuncture in the elderly is huge, but acupuncture also really works through the lymphatic system and the interstitial fluids and fluid regulation, and that's tied into the immune system. And we now realize that a lot of aging is related to this imbalance in the immune system. They'll call it inflammaging, or immunosenescence, and it's this immune system that's out of balance, and acupuncture is, in addition to pain, really very good at helping to balance the immune system.
Those 2 big overarching things that happen in aging are really important, specific things that acupuncture does, and then the other one is just the cognitive decline. In human populations, and they've modeled it in rodent models, acupuncture really seems to help reduce some of that cognitive decline and help individuals be more alert…And so that that ability to maybe reset some of the neural networks in a way that they're more active. My elderly patient clients will be like, ‘Oh my gosh, we went home and they just ran around and played like they were young again.’ And so that's a huge piece too, that cognitive piece.
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