New Digs! Part Deux

Hi all,

I’ve moved!

December 5, 2012: Vital Animal | The Natural Path

And moved again, this time to my new and improved website on the WordPress.org platform: www.VitalAnimal.com/blog. Here I share with you everything I know about how to raise a healthy animal in the natural way, and there’s a lot now, and it’ll continue to grow.

Please stop in and look around, and let me know what you need that might not be up there yet.

My newold url, where all these posts are, along with any moving forward, is www.Alt4Animals.com/blog

That last link will forward you to VitalAnimal.com, so anyway you’ve like to come over and visit, Please join me there!

Lucky guess!

Reblogged from Under the Mountain Bunker:

via: savagemike

Dude, I WATCHED you. (WordPress makes you take one more step to fully appreciate this: click on the cat)

CE (and hope for the incurable patient!)

I’m back from Portland. Spent a long weekend with my homeopathic veterinary colleagues, sharing info and attending lectures from those who brought something to present to the rest of us. It was sometimes heady, sometimes sleepy, sometimes funny, and always interesting. One of the coolest ideas came not from a lecture, but from chatting across the isle in the airplane before take off from Houston with a friend I’d spent time with in the Fall, learning alternative homeopathic methods for treating cancer. “I get amazing results treating my difficult skin cases with this remedy!” A remedy I’d rarely had success with, so had abandoned. But now, having heard her great successes, I’ll dust it off and try it again. Gave a dose to my itchiest patient today, in fact. The jury will reconvene in two weeks to see if it worked.

Portland is home to one of the oldest naturopathic colleges in the country, the National College of Natural Medicine, where they teach human medicine in the natural vein, with courses in homeopathy, herbs, hydrotherapy, manipulation, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, among others. A nice sister city to Austin, Portland is suitably hip and alternative and green, just a whole lot cloudier and cooler than we are down here.

Here’s where we met:

Another memorable lecture was from Julie Ann Lee, who’s a Canadian homeopath who, while not a veterinarian, has found a lovely niche treating animals under the auspices of a vet clinic, and who has an amazing ability to think outside the box and get sterling results in her patients. She gave us a couple hour lecture on a new way of looking at the allopathically damaged patients that we see so often. These are the animals who’ve been vaccinated repeatedly, then, when they became ill from that, suppressed repeatedly with strong immune suppressants and antibiotics of every imaginable stripe, and they’ve not only not gotten well from all of this, but they’ve slowly but surely become more ill. Seriously, sufferingly ill. They’ve got very advanced pathology from all the treatments they’ve received, and they are a bit like a ticking time bomb. They can “blow up” on the homeopath who starts to try to unwind all the suppression and get them well. But they can also, more commonly, just frustrate the daylights out of the homeopath, because they often don’t respond to remedies well chosen for their situation. Or, if they do respond, it’s not in that beautiful, awe inspiring way of running for the goal (called cure). They’ll get just a bit better on some symptom, and it won’t last. Or they’ll get a bit better on one, and a new symptom pops out.

These poor guys have been so damaged by the multiple drugs to suppress their symptoms that they’ve become “confused” or “complex” disease cases. It means the drug-induced illness has engrafted itself onto the inherent illness, and now it’s a real mess to try to discern any clear symptoms. And boy, are they tough to treat.

Julie Ann found her way through several of these with a novel approach. She began to look simply at the physiology where the bulk of the disease is showing up. Maybe the blood vessels and heart. Maybe the skeleton. Or the nervous system. And rather than prescribing on the totality of the case, which was very difficult to see, she began prescribing acute, almost “first aid” remedies, but ones that fit those areas of pathology. Some of these were seemingly simple injury remedies, like arnica or bellis. And, lo, the patient began to respond. For months, or even years, these poor guys were able, through judicious repetition of the “acute” remedy, to find their way back from horrible pathology, to a life they could once again enjoy. It was remarkable.

And now, another tool joins my tool box. Thanks, Julie.

Continuing education. It’s a great way to get a fresh perspective after being in the trenches for a good while. Glad I can do it in homeopathy, where my heart lies.

Amish Farm Kids Have Very Few Allergies

A lovely example of what avoiding vaccines and eating food as it is in Nature brings you.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/04/us-kidsallergies-idUSBRE8431J920120504

Nothing much. What are you doing?

Reblogged from Under the Mountain Bunker:

• 

Just vacuuming the dog

via: afternoonsnoozebutton

A dog's life (in America, at least) To get the full effect and see the blissful state this dog is in, click on a pic to see it in motion!

My Dog is Due for His Shots! NOT.

Really? Says who?

This is a common thing I hear, less and less from my clients who gain a deeper understanding the longer they work with me and explore and think about health in a new way, but quite common in conventional veterinary medicine.

You’ve seen them: the postcards that come, saying Spot or Puff is due for all those checked off diseases to be vaccinated against, with the date “due” prominently there.

“Make an Appointment Today!” “Don’t let your protection lapse!” “Be responsible!”

It’s worth taking a critical look at this before you leap into the car, pets in tow, for more vaccines.

Have you gotten postcards like this every year for you?

No? Why not?

Largely, it’s because you’ve been recognized to be immune from the vaccinations you had way back when you were young, and rolled up your sleeve and grimaced as the needle slid in.

Immunology has recognized this phenomenon for a great many years.
“A practice that was started many years ago and that lacks scientific validity or verification is annual re-vaccinations. Almost without exception there is no immunologic requirement for annual revaccinations. Immunity to viruses persists for years or for the life of the animal.”

The above quote is from Current Veterinary Therapy, volume IX, in 1992. The authors were not alternative or holistic folks, they were veterinary immunologists, widely known in that field. Here’s a link to part of the chapter, and some more efficacy information from my website.

So, why so much emphasis still on repeating vaccinations? Even in the face of major voices in vet medicine speaking out against it, including the AAHA and most veterinary schools?

Follow the money, honey. 

Who labels vaccines for yearly repetition? The manufacturers.

Based on studies showing the immunity disappears at around, say, day 364?

No, nothing of the sort.

Based on one thing, and one thing only.

$$$ 

Sell more doses, make more money. Science is not involved in this part of the label at all.

So, let’s put it this way. If your doctor said it was really in your best interests to get vaccinated every year, would you do it? What would you want to read that would convince you this was necessary? I suspect it’d be more than a label on the vial of vaccine, right?

Tell me what you think in the comments.

Rescued Dog Now Rehabs Others

So, being a veterinarian, I get lots of neat stories sent my way about the things animals do that surprise or charm us two-leggeds. Here’s one that is quite remarkable. Enjoy.

Jasmine In 2003, police in Warwickshire, England, opened a garden shed and found a whimpering, cowering dog. It had been locked in the shed and abandoned. It was dirty and malnourished, and had clearly been abused. In an act of kindness, the police took the dog, which was a Greyhound female, to the nearby Nuneaton Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary, run by a man named Geoff Grewcock and known as a willing haven for Animals abandoned, orphaned or otherwise in need. Click for more info: http://www.warwickshirewildlifesanctuary.co.uk/index.htm Geoff and the other sanctuary staff went to work with two aims to restore the dog to full health, and to win her trust. It took several weeks, but eventually both goals were achieved. They named her Jasmine, and they started to think about finding her an adoptive home.

But Jasmine had other ideas. No-one remembers now how it began, but she started welcoming all Animal arrivals at the sanctuary.
It wouldn’t matter if it was a puppy, a fox cub, a rabbit or, any other lost or hurting Animal, Jasmine would peer into the box or cage and, where possible, deliver a welcoming lick.

Geoff relates one of the early incidents. “We had two puppies that had been abandoned by a nearby railway line.
One was a Lakeland Terrier cross and another was a Jack Russell Doberman cross.
They were tiny when they arrived at the centre and Jasmine approached them and grabbed one by the scruff of the neck in her mouth and put him on the settee.
Then she fetched the other one and sat down with them, cuddling them.”

“But she is like that with all of our animals, even the rabbits.
She takes all the stress out of them and it helps them to not only feel close to her but to settle into their new surroundings.

“She has done the same with the fox and badger cubs, she licks the rabbits and guinea pigs and even lets the birds perch on the bridge of her nose.”

Jasmine, the timid, abused, deserted waif, became the animal sanctuary’s resident surrogate mother, a role for which she might have been born.
The list of orphaned and abandoned youngsters she has cared for comprises five fox cubs, four badger cubs, 15 chicks, eight guinea pigs, two stray puppies and 15 rabbits.

And one roe deer fawn. Tiny Bramble, 11 weeks old, was found semi-conscious in a field. Upon arrival at the sanctuary,
Jasmine cuddled up to her to keep her warm, and then went into the full foster mum role.
Jasmine the greyhound showers Bramble the Roe deer with affection.

“They are inseparable,” says Geoff “Bramble walks between her legs and they keep kissing each other.
They walk together round the sanctuary.

It’s a real treat to see them.”

Jasmine will continue to care for Bramble until she is old enough to be returned to woodland life.
When that happens, Jasmine will not be lonely. She will be too busy showering love and affection on the next Orphan or victim of abuse.

From left, Toby, a stray Lakeland dog; Bramble, orphaned Roe deer; Buster, a stray Jack Russell; a dumped rabbit; Sky, an injured barn owl; and Jasmine with a Mothers heart doing best what a caring Mother would do.