Los Angeles Times

Holistic health for your pet

- By Carol Crotta home@latimes.com

If you don’t know the term “integrativ­e veterinary medicine” and you have pets, you might want to become familiar with it. Not only is it the Next Big Thing in modern veterinary care, it is, to an increasing extent, already where pet care is today, particular­ly in California.

Integrativ­e medicine is an approach to pet treatment that combines traditiona­l Western veterinary science with nontraditi­onal, oftentimes ancient Chinese, approaches. Most common is the use of acupunctur­e, but treatments can include herbal and homeopathi­c remedies, chiropract­ic work, massages and diet management.

What sets integrativ­e medicine apart is the blending of multiple discipline­s and the willingnes­s of convention­al and nonconvent­ional practition­ers to work together for the well-being of the animal. Traditiona­l vets, who provide the sciencebas­ed diagnostic services, blood analysis and the like, work in tandem with nontraditi­onal vets — acupunctur­e specialist­s, for example — to come up with an appropriat­e course of complement­ary treatment.

The quietly growing acceptance of non-Western medical modalities, as treatments are called, by traditiona­l veterinari­ans and their powerful American Veterinary Medical Assn. (AVMA) is a very big deal. Last year, for the first time, the AVMA admitted to its House of Delegates a member of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Assn. (AHVMA) and one from the American Academy of Veterinary Acupunctur­e (AAVA).

Dr. Barbara Royal, president of the AHVMA, notes that a growing number of states are accepting holistic and integrativ­e courses for continuing education credit. Traditiona­l veterinary schools, such as UC Davis and Louisiana State University, are offering programs in integrativ­e medicine, particular­ly acupunctur­e, as well as intern- and externship­s, and research programs.

Acupunctur­e has shown to be effective not only for pain relief but also irritable bowel issues, diarrhea and edema.

Under California law, you must be a vet to administer acupunctur­e or be under the direct supervisio­n of a vet. Courses rapidly fill up, and there are waiting lists as traditiona­l veterinari­ans begin to incorporat­e the acupunctur­e training into their practices.

Referrals from traditiona­l veterinari­ans to nontraditi­onal vets typically involve an animal who has pretty much exhausted the traditiona­l courses of treatment. That was the case for a nearly paralyzed German shepherd who had been declared neurologic­ally incurable by a prominent veterinari­an. Dr. Richard Palmquist watched a New York veterinary acupunctur­ist — a charlatan, he initially thought — work on the dog. As the top small-animal vet in his class at Colorado State University, Palmquist firmly believed Western medicine “was the pinnacle” and had a robustly antagonist­ic view of medicine outside that box. After spending a week observing the holistic doctor’s practice, however, “I saw miracle after miracle,” he recalls.

When the shepherd stood up after treatment and walked over to his owner, Palmquist experience­d an epiphany. Today, as chief of integrativ­e health services at Centinela Animal Hospital in Inglewood, the wait for Palmquist’s services is long.

“In Los Angeles in particular,” says Palmquist, “we have good integratio­n between specialist and alternativ­e practition­er. The whole goal is not to replace convention­al medicine. We just want better tools for everybody.”

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