Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats (45 page)

Realizing this, we can see how dynamic our biological structures are—going through
continual repair and renewal. Therefore, there is a
constant
need for new material to keep the body intact and healthy. Much of what we are made up of can be created from food, by reorganizing and combining molecules that are already in the food. There are, however, certain substances—vitamins, minerals, and the amino acids that make up pro-tein—that cannot be made in the body and must be obtained from food. So here we arrive at the crux of the problem: to stay entirely healthy, we must have food that provides these
essential nutrients
. The first part of this book, chapters 2 through 6, focuses on this most important aspect of health. To summarize, here are the chief points to understand:

• Use of artificial fertilizers forces rapid growth of food plants, which do not have time to take up the minerals from the soil that our bodies need.
  
• Harvesting plants while they are still unripe, to make shipping easier, prevents full development of the nutritional quality found in nature.
  
• Processing and packaging food destroys some very fragile components, especially certain vitamins, proteins, and enzymes. Often heating and cooking food does this.
  
• Shipping and storage of foods so that they have a long shelf life lets the fragile nutrients, like essential fatty acids, break down from being at room temperature and exposed to oxygen.
  

The very process of harvesting, shipping, and processing food compromises the fragile components in the food that we rely on to keep us in optimum health. Though measures can be taken to minimize these effects, it still behooves us to use food that is as fresh and natural as possible.

THE LIMITATIONS OF A PARTIAL APPROACH

Like all veterinarians, I learned the conventional approach of diagnosis and treatment in school and practiced it for years. And it has certainly had some remarkable successes, particularly with acute infections and trauma. Yet when we approach health problems from a symptom-centered perspective, our thinking tends to get so specialized and materialistic that we lose sight of the larger biological patterns and processes. Instead, we tend to rely heavily on the use of drugs and surgery, often to the exclusion of a broader program of health building and prevention.

As a result, contemporary medicine generally is geared toward
controlling
and
counteracting
symptoms and disturbances. It virtually ignores the body’s innate ability to heal itself, given the right supports. Instead of strengthening the patient, the methods largely just compensate for the body’s weaknesses.

Understandably, we are so eager for quick and easy solutions that we turn rather indiscriminately to some drug or vitamin, like the
questioner at the beginning of this chapter. As a result, we may once again cover up symptoms without addressing underlying causes. Unfortunately, some modern drugs are especially good at such suppression. Some, like the various forms of synthetic cortisone, are so powerful that they can stop a great many widely varying symptoms in their tracks,
but the disturbance continues in the body,
hidden from view
.

Time and again, when my associates and I take medical histories, we observe that animals vigorously treated with such drugs (apparently successfully) have gone on to develop another condition a few weeks or months down the line. Usually, it is more serious. For instance, a dog with a skin problem that is continually suppressed with a cortisone-like drug may later develop calcification of the spine, pancreatitis, or kidney failure. Or a cat with a chronically inflamed bladder that is treated with drugs will often later show a deeper problem like kidney failure, diabetes, or hyperthyroidism.

Though we tend to regard the new conditions as being unrelated to the prior ones, I suggest they are not. The suppressed disorder has simply made a more serious inroad into the body, now involving internal and more critical organs.

PROBLEMS CAUSED BY DRUGS

A related problem associated with such dependence on powerful drugs is the production of side effects or even iatrogenic (“doctor-caused”) diseases. Although iatrogenic disturbances are considered to be a serious problem in human medicine, veterinary researchers have made little study of them. In my own opinion and experience, however, they are common in animal medicine as well. I have seen many pets improve considerably when prolonged drug treatment is simply stopped.

Some examples of common drug-related complications are loss of appetite or diarrhea (from the use of oral antibiotics), as well as skin rashes, convulsions, hearing loss (from the use of tranquilizers or antibiotics), severe life-threatening anemia (lack of red blood cells), and behavioral changes—usually towards irritability and aggressiveness, but sometimes appearing as anxiety manifesting as fear of noise, thunder, strangers, and even unusual objects.

If symptoms like this appear soon after therapy begins, they are probably related to the drug. It may not be the drug that is directly toxic so much as the overall energy-depleting effect of using such suppressive medicines. We must remember that symptoms are there for a reason, that they are part of the body’s defense mechanism, and that to suppress them over and over again will only weaken the animal. The most common effect of long-term drug use is the animal becoming sluggish and inactive.

In many situations, drugs are not even called for, yet they are used to “appease the client” and to justify the expense of the office
call. As an example, antibiotics are often prescribed to treat viral diseases. Yet, antibiotics are only effective against bacteria, not viruses. It is not just the veterinarian (or M.D.) who is to blame. Many people insist on a “shot” or some pills to take home, and if the doctor doesn’t comply, they will go to another who will. Unfortunately, we have all been sold on the necessity for these drugs. I question that assumption, both on the basis of my own success and that of many other people who use more natural methods that work with the body’s healing forces. Is it so difficult to think there may be other ways of healing disease besides using drugs? Why have we come to rely so heavily on drugs, as well as surgery and other compensatory methods?

The historical development of Western medicine is a complex subject, but I think a lot of it boils down to several culturally shared ways of thinking that most of us hold, whether doctor or client. One of these is that we want a “quick fix.” We don’t want to change our lives or habits that much. It’s easier to just continue on the main pathway of our culture, even if it is limited by certain assumptions.

Even if we are willing to undertake a change of habits or lifestyle, we often settle for just adapting ourselves to live with a problem that we assume we can’t change. For example, we learn to avoid certain foods that cause allergic reactions. Yet if we took the time and care to work a little harder at understanding and treating the disorder, we might be able to do away with the allergic state altogether. And, in fact, I expect my patients to actually recover from food allergies during nutritional and homeopathic treatment.

DIVERGENT VIEWS IN MEDICINE

An even more fundamental stumbling block comes from the materialistic view that has long dominated Western science, with profound effect on modern thought and culture. Because scientists cannot see or measure such slippery phenomena as consciousness, thoughts, feelings, life energies, or whole systems, most of them have only studied the physical, material aspects of life. Accordingly, our current science, medicine, and culture regard the body as though it were a mere physical object, much like a machine, a collection of chemical and mechanical processes.

As a result, while virtually all cultures and systems of healing in the history of the world, including ours, have alluded to the presence of a unifying life force, our scientists no longer do. The Chinese call this life force chi. The Polynesians knew it as
mana
. The Sioux referred to it as
wakonda
. To the Egyptians, it was
ka
and to the Hindus it is still
prana
. In the Middle East, the word is
baraka
. In Africa, the Bushmen speak of
n/um
. The Aborigines, the most ancient culture on earth, call it
arungquiltha
.

In our own history of Western medicine and philosophy, it was called the
vital force
.
What do we mean when we use a term like this? The words themselves are not important. We could use chi or “the energy that makes us live;” it doesn’t matter as long as we understand what it is pointing to. The concept is that a controlling, directing field of energy (an information field) is behind our physical and psychological manifestation. It is this which grows the body in its perfect order, which keeps it regenerating, and, especially important for our purposes, repairs anything that is broken or damaged. I would love to explore this with you in more detail, but entire books could be (and have been) written about this. Let me give you just one small example of the amazing organizational ability of the force of life.

Ocean sponges are relatively simple creatures, in that there are a limited number of cells that live on top of a supporting skeleton that gives the sponge shape (similar to how our bones give our bodies shape). The sponge creatures, of which there are many types, are consistent enough in their form and characteristics that we can recognize them under different names, as different species. You can take one of these sponges, cut it up into little pieces and squeeze them through a silk cloth so that all the little cells are separated from each other. It results in this “porridge” that has no recognizable shape or resemblance to what you started with. Here is the interesting part: If you let this gruel stand for a while
it gathers and reorganizes
itself
, resulting in a completely normal sponge identical to the one that was separated, a sponge that goes on living like nothing has happened.

As if this is not amazing enough, in one experiment, two different types of sponges—a red one and a yellow species, not related to each other—were put through this process and mixed together. Nonetheless, over the next 24 hours the red and yellow cells managed to separate themselves and reorganize back into the original sponges that they were at the beginning. As Lyall Watson puts it in his remarkable book,
Supernature
, that describes these experiments, “This ability to instill order is the most vital and peculiar characteristic of living beings.”

But as modern science was taking shape, a philosophical split occurred between the
vitalists
, who asserted the existence of such a force that animated and governed physical organisms, and the
materialists
, who denied it and said that all life could be explained in terms of chemical and physical processes. The materialists predominated, and their views became the underpinning of our contemporary science, medicine, and culture. Because this perspective mostly discounts the organism’s guiding intelligence, it is not surprising that mainstream medicine generally treats symptoms like an enemy that must be controlled and suppressed.

Understandably, this turning point in the history of science explains why most of us today look almost exclusively to physical explanations for disease. We look first for germs, parasites, genetic defects, or just plain wear and tear from old age. In addition, our bias is
to focus our research money on those physical factors that best tie in with marketable solutions, such as a new drug, rather than those that would require a change of diet or lifestyle or a cleanup of the environment.

So, although doctors may pay some lip service to avoiding emotional stress or may notice how often patients get sick after suffering a psychological upset, the usual “fix” for a health problem involves drugs or surgery. While we may personally acknowledge the importance of thoughts and feelings and perhaps even a unifying intelligence responsible for our living form, as a society we do not seriously take this perspective into account in the prevention and treatment of most diseases.

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF HOLISTIC THERAPIES

In recent times, however, many practitioners and lay people alike have felt constrained by the limits of this approach and have begun to explore and revitalize a number of holistic therapies, both for humans and for animals. What do we mean by the word “holistic”? I have to laugh at some of the definitions I have come across. For example, one person told me, “My veterinarian uses holistic medicine. He gave me some vitamin C!” She really thought that using a vitamin was holistic medicine. So let me try to explain.

Considering what we have been talking about in this chapter so far, it will not be a surprise for me to say that “holistic” implies a different perspective on health. Let’s start with what is familiar to us—the usual—and then contrast it with what we are calling the holistic view.

Shall we call the medicine of our common experience
contemporary medicine?
Such contemporary medicine is also called
allopathic
medicine, the word allopathic meaning that treatments are intended to control, stop, or inhibit the expressions of disease. This is the approach most of us are used to: the doctor and the veterinarian who offer antibiotics, shots for allergies, vaccinations, surgery, and so on. The basic principle with a drug or surgery is to
control
or to
block
what is seen to be the symptoms of illness. For example, an anti-inflammatory drug (aspirin, steroids) is used in allopathic approaches to stop the expression of inflammation. Another example is a drug that stops epileptic seizures by inhibiting some brain functions. Yes, I know—it seems self-evident, common sense. Yet we do have to acknowledge that if contemporary medicine was
completely
successful, I wouldn’t be writing about this and you wouldn’t be interested in reading it.