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My dog tore his cruciate ligament a year ago. The vet urged surgery. Other vets urged surgery. But our guy was older - 9 - and huge (Malamute @ 140 pounds with his winter fur...15 pounds lighter when we shave him in the summer), and 2 of his dog friends who were the same age died while in surgery. At that same time the NYT published a study done on people with torn ACLs and their treatment. The results were statistically even between those who had surgery and those who opted out of surgery and did physical therapy. We didn't want to risk losing our dog to surgery and so tried out a few things, kind of nuttily bolstered by the NYT report (on humans). We treated our dog as though he'd just had surgery, and limited his walks to 5 mins a day. We iced his leg. We massaged his legs with tiger balm. We gave him traumeel to handle the pain (which suited him much better than the prescription pain killers). We chopped up vitamin c and niacin tabs in his food for the first 30 days. We changed his diet to a high end dog food that contained no wheat, no gluten. We cut back on his food so he wouldn't gain weight (which he didn't). We took him to a vet trained in accupuncture, which our dog loved. He used to do a little gimpy dance whenever we took him back to see her. And we gave him the Nutramax Cosequin DS Plus with MSM. We stopped the traumeel after a while, the niacin and vit c, the ice, and increased his walk time. We kept up with the Cosequin throughout. He kept getting a little better, a little better every week. And finally, about a month ago, almost a year later, we noticed that he was back to being the guy he's always been. We attribute this brand of Cosequin to a large part of his recovery. Everyone notices how peppy and agile he is now. We can now continue with our long walks of 1+ hours. We will continue with this Cosequin until the end of his time.