Melissa
Kaplan's
Herp Care Collection
Last updated
January 1, 2014
Complementary Alternative Therapies for Herps
©2000 Melissa Kaplan
The problem is that there is little hard research into the benefits of most of these treatment modalities. Worse, it is an area rife with charlatans and individuals who mean well but end up creating medical disasters. One example is in the case of nutritionists who do not do adequate testing - and looking at your saliva or hair is (with very few exceptions) about as effective as using a Ouija board to figure out what is wrong with you. The results range from no benefit/no harm, to destroyed stomach and intestinal linings and hypervitaminosis or hypermineralosis. Many herbs, vitamins and minerals impair the function of many drugs. If you take them together, you end up negating one, such as taking thyroid medication within 6 hours of taking an iron supplement.
There's also a lot of bad information out there, ranging from outright quackery ("My nutritionist said that drinking this herbal tea will cure my prostate cancer") to shoddy workmanship, such as the Kaiser-Permanent (Santa Rosa, CA) hand-out to someone with iron overload disease that says that taking vitamin C helps the body get rid of iron (in fact, taking vitamin C with iron supplements or eating high C foods when eating iron-containing foods enhances the body's uptake of iron, exactly the opposite of someone with critically high levels of iron needs!).
The medical school curriculum rarely includes a unit on nutrition; they certainly haven't added anything so radical as the study of herbs, nutriceuticals and aromatherapy! Thus, it is up to us as individuals to do our own research into the sparse but growing body of scientific literature on CAM and discuss them with our health care provider. As pet owners, we are equally responsible for doing the research and discussing them with our veterinarians if we are interested in using these things to help improve the health and quality of life for our pets.
The inclusion of any commercial sites below should not be taken as a recommendation of the companies products or services. Instead, they are there because I found the information presented on these sites to be useful in understanding what some of the alternatives are.
Information Sites
AVMA Position on
CAM
Guidelines
for Alternative and Complementary Veterinary Medicine
Letters
of Dissent
Body Work:
Acupuncture
- Bibliographies
International
Veterinary Acupuncture Society
American Veterinary Chiropractic
Association
Veterinary Sources
Alternative
Veterinary Medicine (AltVet)
What's
Your Alternative? (JAVMA)
General Sources
National
Center for Complementary and Alterntive Medicine
Journals
Alternative
Medicine Review
Journal
of Naturopathic Physicians
Drugs and Medications
Resources
Most people
make the mistake of not realizing that the vitamins, minerals, aminos,
herbs and the other over-the-counter things they take are drugs. They
are drugs, and like prescription drugs, can interfere with the action
of other drugs and in healing and post-operative recovery.
Sites
Drug
Information
Safemedication.com
Supplementinfo.org
Books
Encyclopedia
of Natural Medicine,
Revised 2nd Edition (1997), Michael T. Murray, Joseph E. Pizzorno
a1
Books,Amazon.ca,
Amazon
US, Amazon
UK, Barnes
& Noble, Booksamillion.com,
Buy.com
Prescription for
Nutritional Healing, 1997, James and Phyllis Balch.
a1
Books, Amazon.ca,
Amazon
US, Amazon
UK, Barnes
& Noble, Booksamillion.com,
and Buy.com
