Blog - Vital Animal § The Natural Path

Fast Diarrhea Relief!! Metronidazole: Seeing Past the Research

September 17, 2017 by Will Falconer, DVM 16 Comments

Damn the Casualties, We Want a Fast Fix!

There’s a new treatment to beware of. It typifies that short-sightedness of conventional medicine that brings a flame thrower to a bothersome mosquito problem.

Just as antibiotics are the most mis-prescribed and over-prescribed class of drugs in people and pets…

At least 30 percent of antibiotics prescribed in the United States are unnecessary, according to new data published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)1

… so, too, is Flagyl, aka metronidazole.

I frequently hear its use from many clients and from many who read and comment on this blog.

Flagyl’s claim to fame is “fixing” diarrhea.

And it does, sort of.

But like with all antibiotics, at a cost to your animal that you’ll want to be aware of. [Read more…]

Follow This or Innocent Dogs Will Die

July 23, 2017 by Will Falconer, DVM 15 Comments

Juliette de Bairacli Levy — Juliette of the Herbs, 1912-2009

Natural Rearing: More Important Now Than Ever

Raising animals naturally (aka “rearing” them naturally in the old parlance) now takes on an importance like it never has in decades past.

The risk of your dog getting chronic disease is higher now than it has ever been before.

Most of these chronic diseases are accompanied by misery for your dog and you, and not uncommonly, significant expense.

We live now with the increasingly maddening notion of “science knows best,” born of our post-world war infatuation with pesticides.

[Read more…]

The Prejudice Against Homeopathy

July 3, 2017 by Richard Pitcairn 9 Comments

You can believe me. I wear a stethoscope and look serious.

In the last few years there has been an increasing criticism of the use of homeopathy as a medical treatment system. My suspicion is that this is happening because more and more people are using it and the other medical practitioners and the pharmaceutical companies are starting to feel it in their pocket books. In any case this is happening and it is increasingly annoying.

I want to give you a recent example of this and show how it is an example of prejudice, not the comments of a neutral observer. [Read more…]

Flu Fear Fans Vaccination Flames

June 18, 2017 by Will Falconer, DVM 12 Comments

Three pups wrestling on grass — Whoo hooo! Hey, any of you guys have a cough?

Panic Time? Not if You’re Smart.

The canine influenza virus (CIV to the lab folks, or dog flu to most of us) has made another come back. Dog flu was all the rage in Chicago in 2015, and I posted about the likely “genus epidemicus” (remedies to cure and/or prevent this illness) back then, and I’m sure it still applies today.

What’s changed that it’s going around again?

Very little, from the sounds of it. It’s cropped up at some dog shows and a
recent post on the AVMA site reveals it’s moved back into several states this
time around.

In May 2017, canine H3N2 influenza was diagnosed in dogs in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, and Illinois. This was the same strain of H3N2 involved in the 2015 outbreak in Chicago.1

I was a bit surprised to hear of the resurgence, as I expected there’d be a
wide spread immunity by now, two years after the initial run.

Also surprising to me is the apparent hysteria to get dogs vaccinated, likely
fueled by the media, who are milking the “contagion factor” all they can. [Read more…]

Vaccinated vs Unvaccinated: The Study Skeptics Tried to Hide

June 11, 2017 by Will Falconer, DVM 30 Comments

Crocodile hidden danger — Nothing to see here. But come a little closer…

Snopes Was Part of the Coverup

A long-awaited research study came to light recently, the first of its kind to compare goodly numbers of vaccinated vs unvaccinated kids.

What was the study seeking to learn?

The researchers cautiously asked a logical, but unorthodox question: is it possible that all this immune–mediated disease has anything to do with the immune-mediating drugs that children are given in doses five times that of their parents? (And yes, autism is brain damage but it is almost certainly the result of a damaged immune system). Could it have anything to do with the 50 doses of 15 immune-stimulating vaccines before age six compared to the three doses of three vaccines the last generation — that wasn’t so sick — got?1

First of Its Kind

When I say long-awaited, it’s because this kind of study has never been done.

It compared well-matched children who were vaccinated and unvaccinated, and tracked how they fared from age 6-12.

It is one of very few studies to examine the explosion of once rare disorders and conditions affecting modern children (all the millions of 21st century First World earaches, allergies, hayfever, ADD, neurodevelopmental disorders and autism, that is damaging young children’s brains in spiking numbers).2