You can do an immense amount of good for your animals by reading and applying what's in this site, even without me taking your animal on personally as a patient. If you start with Nutrition, and really do the best you can in this area, many, many problems will either be eliminated or greatly lessened. If you're animal is "due" for more vaccinations, read that section of the site thoroughly, and don't feel rushed to get more shots. And, if your animal has any disease involving the immune system, read and apply the principals and protocols outlined in Immunity, and you will likely see further improvement of a substantial nature.

My goal in sharing all of this information is to really give animal caregivers the best tools possible, so they can take excellent care of their animals and PREVENT illness. This is the ideal, and the need for doctoring lessens to a great degree when you act proactively and raise really healthy animals. If I do my job well, you don't need a veterinarian much at all, and your animals live to ripe old ages in shiny health!

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Your Very Own Vaccination Waiver: 1/14/08
Put the FDA to work for you

If you've ever felt that your animal just really shouldn't receive another vaccination, but the office staff and your veterinarian have not been receptive to that idea, please read my latest thoughts on Waiver. More times than not, many animals have a built-in waiver that many veterinarians overlook. And ignoring this waiver can be very costly to health. I can't count the number of times animals have come to me having been vaccinated while they were ill with some disease. This is a dangerous practice, and the FDA is on your side on this one.

Dangerous Pet Foods Recalled: 3/16/07
Check Your Labels

Some pretty familiar brands here, associated with vomiting and kidney failure and death in a number of animals eating them.  I've often been asked if several of these brands aren't pretty good, and I know a lot of vets sell IAMS and Eukanuba.  Looks like the vets' favorite Hill's (of k/d, r/d, i/d, etc/d fame) has food made for them by this same company, as they've recalled some of their products as well.  I've never thought much of any of them, as even the better known are often what I'd refer to as "expensive junk food."  Buyer beware.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17650075/

The Cats Are Shouting! 7/6/05
9-Month-Old Cat Diagnosed with Hyperthyroidism

As I've written elsewhere online ("The Cats are Talking...About Chronic Disease"), the incidence of chronic, lingering, degenerative diseases has steadily grown from when I was in vet school some 25 years ago. That's not a very long time, in the big picture of how long wolves and bobcats and their ancestors and cousins we have in our homes have been on the planet. And today, across my desk comes a copy of a veterinary journal called Veterinary Forum, with a case report entitled, "Hyperthyroidism in a 9-Month-Old Cat." In it, the author, a veterinarian in Portage, Michigan, describes the classic signs of this "new" disease (unheard of in the 70's, and probably 80's), in a kitten, not yet even a year old: extreme hyperactivity, inability to sleep, and, a bit unusual in my experience, aggressive behavior. It's common to also see the symptoms of unending hunger, weight loss, and crying out in hyperthyroidism, but this guy wasn't showing these signs. With blood tests both in-house and at Michigan State University, the lab results were confirmative: the little guy had hyperthyroidism! His bodily "thermostat" was racing, due to a tumor on his thyroid gland.

The treatments laid out were to include radioactive iodine administration, touted to be the best of the options, though it's expensive and so obviously dangerous (the cats' urine must be disposed of as a radioactive substance for many days after treatment, hence the need for specialized hospitalization for those cats undergoing treatment). The kitten in the report was "lost to follow-up," meaning he didn't return for treatment and further diagnostic tests. (Maybe his owner sought holistic care and he's now cured; one can hope.)

Well, the point of my including this in here is simple: preventative medicine, in the conventional sense (yearly vaccines, toxic, lifeless commercial mono-diets, and flea poisons) has failed us miserably. One only needs to look at how the chronic diseases have become so prevalent today to understand this. And these are not trifling diseases that resolve on their own, or with a bit of help from your local veterinarian. These are serious, deep-seated, degenerative illnesses that undermine the animal's well being for the rest of its life. Examples are allergies, Cushing's disease, Addison's disease, cancer, kidney failure, heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, etc, etc, etc.

So, it really pays to be open-minded, explore alternatives, and prevent, yes, please prevent illness, but not in the model offered for the last several decades by the white coats. You'll have to do better than that if you want your animal to stay healthy and vigorous and alive to a ripe old age. Hopefully, you'll find some good ideas within these pages.

Optimizing Health vs. "Getting By" 2/3/05

We just had an excellent veterinary conference call tonight on how to think about the use of nutrition and supplementation. I'd like to share some of these thoughts and hope this will be useful to help you chart the course for your animals.

In veterinary medicine, as in human medicine, the emphasis has historically been on treatment of disease. We have become quite good at measuring disease even: high white blood cell counts, high cholesterol, or liver enzymes, or BUN if the kidneys are failing, but we have almost no clue when it comes to measuring wellness. Consequent with that focus has been a "get by" approach, where we emphasize what levels of nutrients prevent deficiency diseases, or what amount of drugs will keep away heartworm, or what amount of poisons will kill fleas without killing the dog they live on.

What we need to focus on is "optimization" instead: how can we affect our animals in such a way that they don't just get by (which nowadays usually means succumbing to some chronic disease like allergies or eventually cancer), but rather THRIVE? What can we do so that we are not chasing disease with treatments, even natural, non-toxic treatments, but rather making our animals so healthy that they naturally resist disease and live long, robust, resilient lives. This optimal state of health and its resiliency allows them to withstand the stressors that inevitably come along, be they weather changes, or travel, or kenneling, or infectious disease.

A great example is the use of probiotics as a means of enhancing health. It's been proven that animals can live without these "friendly bacteria" in the lower gut, as can people, but they live a tenuous existence. A small input of some disease causing organism will throw these unfortunates into frank illness, like diarrhea or even death from salmonella, for example. But the animal getting regular doses of probiotics will be able to withstand a large number of the same pathogens and not get ill. Why? The immunity enhancing effects of the probiotics make it impossible for the pathogens to take hold -- they are out-competed by the good guys.

Similarly, there's immune enhancement with things like transfer factor. We know these are present in the first milk or colostrum, and these "immune intelligence" proteins make the difference between life and death in the newborn. But we also now know that we can optimize an immune system by giving regular doses of transfer factor to any age of animal. This is not necessary to "get by," but is getting by good enough? Certainly not for me and the majority of my clients!

The whole approach of holistic health is really this: taking those measures that act on the whole organism for the betterment of health, optimizing all systems, to not only prevent illness but to effect maximum length and quality of life. Proactive prevention is a big key to health. How we do this is not as simple as vaccinating yearly and feeding Science Diet, two practices I've seen cause more problems than they prevented! And remember, optimization, or gaining peak efficiency in your animal, does not happen by accident. You, as the main caregiver, have to do some things to achieve and maintain optimal health and wellness. One of the absolute easiest things is to incorporate the TF Complete formulas into your daily regime: Canine, Feline, or for the horse, Performance and Show. Read more about this approach here: Immunity

Whew, I never guessed how long it would take to get this all into print. This site has all the information I've shared with clients in my consultations for the last nearly 18 years as a holistic veterinarian, so I just assumed it would flow out and get up there on the web. Wrong. It took a lot of writing, finding the right way to say things in print, proof reading, making navigation smooth and non-redundant, in short, a lot more than I expected. But, it's finally here, and I hope it can be of service to you in making choices for your animals' health care. Because, ultimately, it's the choices we make in day to day care that most affects our animals' health.

My goal has always been to be a provider of sound information, and to allow my clients to make their best choices. What's been rewarding of late is seeing a few clients coming who have already made the choices I have been hoping for for these last many years. (OK, so I'm not unbiased!) A few dogs have come with no vaccination history what so ever, not because they were ill, but just to establish a working relationship with me should they need homeopathic prescribing in the future. "Not ill" is a gross understatement -- they have been extraordinarily healthy, in fact! A few youngsters have come from breeders who've raised parent dogs with natural diets, no or very few vaccines, and natural health care. Again, the pups didn't come ill. They were exuberantly healthy! Their owners were wanting to have a preventative approach to raising these guys that didn't include vaccines (or minimized them), that had natural options for heartworm prevention, and diet? I hardly had to say anything, as they were already on balanced raw food, like BARF.

That's really rewarding after years of offering alternatives and answering questions (and raised eyebrows) on my views that may have been heard for the very first time. It tells me that the movement towards natural health has been progressing, and those who feed raw food, and choose not to vaccinate annually, or not give drugs to suppress symptoms are in a growing number now. Maybe not yet a majority, but substantially more than even 10 years ago.

Looking Ahead
I'm most excited about the potential for making immune based diseases a thing of history, with the tiny molecules named transfer factors (see Immunity). The ability to pass on immunologic competence, no longer just from dam to offspring, but from dam to adults of different species, is truly a remarkable achievement. When we are beset as a society with so many immunological challenges, from infectious diseases that circle the globe with airlines, to over reactive immune systems in allergies, to immune breakdown in cancer, the simplicity and depth of immune support offered by these molecules is truly heartening. When animals too old for surgery and its anesthetic risks can be given oral immune support and have eyelid or other tumors shrink away and disappear; when Russian scientists, studying interleukin for years, but frustrated by it's toxicity and high cost, excitedly return home after seeing transfer factors increase Natural Killer cell activation by 437%; when the Navy Seals program, whose special op forces lead highly stressful and rigorous missions, begins studying transfer factor as a means of optimizing their mens' health, we are really seeing a paradigm shift in health care.

This is really the right use of technology. But nature's technology. Learning to harness what nature has created for the good of man and animals is far superior to trying to create new, more toxic drugs with side effects that may be more serious than the diseases they treat. This is what 4Life Research is doing in their work with transfer factors. They have unlocked something extremely useful in the form of molecules that have been there all along, in colostrum, egg yolk, and white blood cells, among other tissues. Purifying these molecules in a patented process that preserves efficacy across species lines, and making them available world wide has been the company's forte. I am glad to be part of that effort, and will be conducting my own research on the use of transfer factors to cure heartworm disease. If you are interested in being part of this research, click here. I will publish the results of this study here, so stay tuned, and check back periodically.

Short Course
I know there's a lot here, so, if you want a ranking of the most important information in this site, I would put the top three areas as:

1. Vaccinations, both safety and efficacy
2. Nutrition
3. Immunity
   

The decisions you make in these areas are the ones the have the greatest long term impact, for good or ill.