COVER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Animal house A Veterinary chiropractic offers opportunities for practice expansion by jessica beaulieu or one of the two European programs (Backbone Academy for Veterinary Chiropractic and Healing Arts or Academie Internacional De Quiropractica Animal). Dr. Annette Langlois, a licensed chiropractor, joined Rivera in 2005 and the two directed Cana-da’s VCLC program together until 2010, when chiropractor Dr. Kim Adie became business part-ners with Langlois and signed on as co-director. The two women now run and instruct classes at VCLC, while Rivera focuses primarily on his Wis-consin school. His guidance and the education model he developed at Healing Oasis provided a stable guideline for the VCLC program and he remains actively involved with the Canadian school. Healing Oasis offers three programs: veterinary spinal manipulative therapy (it’s illegal in the state of Wisconsin to use the term “veterinary chiroprac-tic”), veterinary massage and rehabilitation therapy, and an advanced neurology seminar series, in ad-dition to continuing education seminars and courses. The veterinary spinal manipulative therapy pro-gram, which is the basis of the VCLC basic pro-gram, is only open to licensed chiropractors and veterinarians, and includes 226 hours of education. Rivera’s program only lets in about 15 students per class. Those who don’t make the cut are placed on a waiting list. “Call me a control freak, I don’t care, but if they go out with our seal of approval, as attested by the faculty of our school, I want quality, I don’t want quantity,” he says of the size restriction placed on his classrooms. “If you have six, seven, 10 students per lab group what do you learn there? You don’t learn anything. If you have two to three students www.canadianchiropractor.ca JESSICA BEAULIEU is a freelance writer based in Toronto. She can be reached at [email protected]. 24 Canadian Chiropractor July/August 2014 Photo: Mari-Len De Guzman nyone who has ever owned and loved a pet understands the dis-tress that is felt when that animal is in pain. Many pet owners will go to great lengths and explore all options to have that animal feeling better again. One of these options is animal chiropractic, or veterinary chiropractic, a treatment in which spinal manipulation and adjustments are made to correct subluxations and improve neurological functions in animals. The Veterinary Chiropractic Learning Centre (VCLC), based in Brantford, Ont., is a place de-signed to educate licensed chiropractors and vet-erinarians on how best to perform this type of treatment on animals. The first and only certified institution of its kind in Canada, the VCLC prides itself on delivering a quality education program in order to produce professional, safe and qualified graduates, accord-ing to its proponents. The VCLC was established in 2001 by Dr. Pedro Rivera, a licensed veterinarian and animal chiro-practor who is also the founder and lead instructor at the Healing Oasis Wellness Center in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, which he started in 1998. Prior to 2001, if chiropractors wanted to become accredited in the field of animal chiropractic they would have had to attend one of the three programs offered in the United States (Healing Oasis Well-ness Center, Parker Chiropractic College or Op-tions for Animals Animal Chiropractic Program), 220 HOURS Length of study for veterinary chiropractic certification
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