Just back from the Veterinary Homeopathy conference in Portland. I always love going to be with like minded veterinarians and to be reminded and re-inspired by listening to people talk about their successes with homeopathy, by their practices and how they’ve structured them to educated and help people in a way that is so different than the mainstream conventional vet clinic.
One of the take home lessons for me is the reminder about chronic and acute disease, and that although homeopathy is so great at treating the acutes, if we don’t address the underlying susceptibility, we can expect that patient to soon be ill with some other imbalance. A case in point was a young Sharpei cross that the vet treated for acute onset fever and joint swelling. This is a disease called Sharpei fever and is not only costly but also somewhat difficult and can be quite involved to treat conventionally. She saw this dog, who was normally quite friendly and active, lying under the table not wanting to move at all, with quite a high fever, and prescribed a homeopathic medicine called Bryonia. After 4 doses of this, the dog’s fever was on the decline and by the next morning she was eating and on the mend. A few days later she was completely back to normal activity. The presenting vet also did a comparison in her cases of cost and showed that whereas conventional treatment, with supportive care, hospitalization, and IV fluids, would have cost upwards of $800, the homeopathic exam and medicine was under $300. In this case the client was so happy with the results and got her dog back to normal, that the vet remarked that it then becomes difficult to convince the client to do a homeopathic follow up to address the layer underneath – the why the dog got sick in the first place.
There were also a few interesting presentations on treating cancer with homeopathy. One case was a dog with indolent lymphoma. This was something I had not heard of, but apparently can be up to 40% of lymphoma cases, especially in Golden Retrievers around the age of 10. These cancers, different than the regular lymphoma, actually do better statistically without chemo and prednisone and can live for 30 months without any treatment!
The take home message for me about cancer was to do a lot of follow up and make sure the patient is continuously under the influence of a remedy, whether that means more frequent dosing or giving homeopathic medicine in the water daily. This also means that clients need to be in close communication with us, their homeopathic veterinarians!
