THE BENEFITS OF PET THERAPY AS A COMPLEMENTARY INTERVENTION
IN THE MANAGEMENT OF PAIN AND STRESS IN THE TERMINALLY ILL.
Aiken (1994) reports that people with terminal illnesses experience a variety of emotions and concerns. These include: fear of the unknown, loneliness, sorrow, pain and suffering, loss of self-control, loss of identify and all of the physical and debilitative losses associated with the terminal condition. Palliative medicine can be a help for some of the pain and stress these patients are experiencing; however, more and more frequently, hospitals and hospices and other health-care organizations are supplementing their treatment with diverse forms of "alternative medicine" (Broadie & Biley, 1999).
According to Frisby (2000), one of the methods that is being used as an alternative medical approach across a wide assortment of health conditions is "pet therapy, sometimes termed "pet facilitated therapy", or "animal assisted therapy". Essentially, this mode of treatment consists simply of the patient interacting with an animal (e.g., a cat or a dog) on a routine basis. The purpose of this paper is to examine the pet therapy literature in order to determine the approach's efficacy for remediating the pain and/or suffering of the terminally ill patient. The paper ends with the formulation of conclusions based on the reviewed material.
Pet Therapy For Reducing Pain and Suffering
Before examining the pet therapy literature as it relates to the efficacy of the approach for the terminally ill patient, there are two important points that need to be made. First, as pointed out by Draper, Gerber and Layng (1999), while there have been literally thousands of investigations of pet therapy, a substantial portion of these studies are not stringently controlled experimental studies.
Rather, the bulk of these investigations are said to consist primary of anecdotal descriptive studies. In other words, even while the ...