INTRODUCTION
What’s New?
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
—MARGARET MEAD
In 1999, more than two decades ago, I published my first book: The Nature of Animal Healing. This revolutionary act challenged the existing veterinary establishment, which had trained and certified me, while introducing many thousands of pet parents to the principles of integrative medicine—the merging of traditional and alternative treatments into holistic medical practice. I helped pioneer integrative veterinary medicine, over the years gathering with me an ever-larger group of like-minded veterinarians and other animal experts. It was a lonely place to be in the beginning, but today I can proudly say that this emerging field we built together has improved the lives of millions of dogs and cats—in many cases extending their lives or saving them outright.
In the intervening years quite a few books have been published providing people with advice and recommendations for enabling nature to do what it does best—to naturally support the health of companion animals. As you’ll learn as you read on, I firmly believe that it’s not the primary job of veterinarians (or of any other doctors) to treat sick patients—it’s to help them remain healthy in the first place.
We have done so many bad things to our environment, to the food we feed our animal companions, and to the dogs and cats who share their lives with us that illness is not the exception that it was millennia ago. Now it’s expected—it’s par for the course. We expect the dogs and cats in our care to get sick, and they do. Then we load them up with more vaccines than they need, more drugs than they need, more medical procedures than they need. As a result, they’re sicker than ever.
This book is all about getting off the merry-go-round of traditional veterinary practice and trying something different. Something better. Something more natural. Something that offers the dogs and cats in your life the best opportunity to be healthy throughout their lives—and ours.
This book is not a do-it-yourself, how-to of integrative veterinary practice. You won’t find twenty-five different recipes for the best home-cooked dog or cat dinners, and you won’t find recommendations for specific brands of dog and cat food or supplements.
Why not?
First, if I’ve learned anything in my more than forty-five years of veterinary practice, it’s that each dog, each cat is an individual. Like snowflakes, no two are alike. What’s good for one dog might not be so good for another—even of the same breed or litter. For example, while I recommend the feeding of raw food, I’ve seen dogs and cats that simply don’t do well on it—they end up with gastrointestinal upsets or other issues. That’s why, throughout this book, I impress upon you the need to find the best integrative veterinarian you can, then allow that doctor to get to know your animal companions well. This is how you can be assured they will get the best care possible, perfectly tailored to their unique physiology and needs.
As Hippocrates said about the nature of human medicine thousands of years ago, “It is far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.” These wise words also apply to our animal friends.
Second, as we all know, the world is changing faster than ever. This is as true in veterinary practice as it is in every other aspect of our lives. I can pretty much guarantee, for example, that any recommendation I might make for a specific brand of food or course of supplements would be out-of-date a year, five years, or a decade from now. New products and new therapies are introduced all the time, and old ones are discarded.
Consider that smartphones have only been with us for little more than a decade. What kinds of new things will those phones be able to do for us a decade from today? Just look at all the changes they’ve already been through. While I have no idea what new things my phone will be able to do ten years from now, I do definitely know that they will be quite different from anything any of us might imagine in our wildest dreams. Change is a given, and it’s my goal for this book to remain as accurate and relevant as it can be for as long as possible.
Above all, my aim in writing this book is to provide you with a trusted source for the latest thinking in integrative veterinary practice. Some of it might seem to be out on the edge, but most everything we do today in integrative veterinary practice was way out on the edge back in the early seventies when I graduated from veterinary school. My advice to you, the reader and animal lover, is to open your mind to all the possibilities in the world and universe in which we live. We humans don’t know everything there is to know—not by a long shot—and there is much still to learn. Most every day I learn something new about how to make the lives of dogs and cats and other animals (ask me about my flock of chickens!) better.
And we do love our animal companions. According to American Pet Products Association (APPA) statistics, Americans share their homes with some 90 million dogs and 94 million cats.1 Not only that, but we spend more than $75 billion a year on all our animal companions (not just dogs and cats) for food, veterinary care, over-the-counter medications, grooming, and more.2 For many of us, our animal companions are true members of our families whom we depend on for companionship, loyalty, and love. It’s an inseparable bond that has been forged over millennia.
Thanks for joining me on my adventure to good health! Now, let’s get started.
1
HOW FAR HAVE WE COME?
The microbe is nothing; the terrain is everything.
—LOUIS PASTEUR (ON HIS DEATHBED)
I graduated from the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in 1973. In 2018, I returned to my alma mater to give a talk on integrative veterinary medicine. It was a homecoming of sorts, to a school that remains a bastion of conventional veterinary philosophy—just like almost all other university veterinary programs.
When I graduated, almost every veterinarian adhered strictly to the time-honored conventional practices taught by schools of veterinary medicine and the powers that be that subsidized these schools. The treatments were cut-and-dried. If an older dog had cancer, which was relatively rare at the time, you cut out the tumor, or you used powerful drugs to try to kill the cancerous cells—taking healthy cells along with them. If a cat had an infection or allergies, you gave it antibiotics, steroids, or other drugs. Sometimes these treatments had serious side effects, which could turn out to be worse than the original condition we were trying to fix. But we did it because that was what we were taught to do. Unfortunately, not much has changed today except that the number of treatments currently available has skyrocketed.
Cornell gave me one hour to speak and conduct a Q and A, and once word got out about my appearance, we filled the hall with eager students. You can’t teach everything you need to know about integrative veterinary medicine in just one hour, so my major goal was to provide clear and compelling evidence of the efficacy of alternative treatments—that they do work.
While the school’s old guard faculty and administration are still lukewarm to alternative therapies, the students are extremely curious about them and want to know more. I was told that when Cornell’s administration surveyed the student body of the vet school a number of years ago, asking them if they had an interest in or affinity for alternative therapies, 93 percent said yes. But the board of trustees decided to ignore the results, explaining that if they ratified the survey and made changes to the curriculum, it would be like “letting the inmates run the prison and we can’t set that precedent.”
My presentation to the Cornell students wasn’t about proving the school or its administration or professors wrong—it was about expanding the consciousness of the audience members, most of whom were students. Integrative veterinary medicine is the future of our profession, not a passing fad. Why? Because it works with mechanisms nature has created to heal instead of just treating symptoms.
Unfortunately, so much of conventional medicine suppresses these existing flows.
There’s more to healing our animal companions than just diagnosing conditions, cutting out tumors, administering medications, or setting broken bones. A spiritual component is just as important, if not more important in many cases, and alternative and integrative therapies draw from this deep well.
Early in my presentations, I often project a slide about a book I received in 1981 as part of a select group of people, including Mrs. Anwar Sadat. The book, The Hall of Records, is about the human race finding the entombment of knowledge that was in existence during the time of the building of the Great Pyramid. It presents structural measurements, statistics, and levels of construction accuracy that are impossible to fathom knowing that the human race at that time had none of today’s remarkable technology. According to just one passage from the book, “In more modern terms, the Pyramid contains enough material to build thirty Empire State Buildings.”1 Clearly, some level of knowledge and ability existed thousands of years ago that is well beyond our current comprehension.
And guess what? Acupuncture was laid down in about the same era. I showed my audience a human acupuncture model that has 361 discrete points covering its entire surface. I said, “Do you realize that back then they knew every single point and every single connection to a meridian of energy flow, and every connection to every internal organ at a time when it was sacrilegious to dissect the human body? And we’re just now beginning to understand the workings of the more than 360 points and the meridians they are on that these ancient healers discovered thousands of years ago.”
How did they know that?
Welcome to the future. Actually, “Welcome to the past” is exactly what I said to them.
Integrative medicine is both old and new, simultaneously. We know of plants and herbs that have been used by humans for thousands of years to address a variety of illnesses, and they could have an equal or better, more pronounced effect than do modern-day drugs. Many of these same plants and herbs can have a positive effect on the health and wellness of our animal companions.
For example, a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania medical school revealed that the turkey tail medicinal mushroom has great success in treating one of the most nonresponsive cancers in dogs: hemangiosarcoma of the spleen.2 According to the report, dogs with this cancer have a median survival time of eighty-six days, and chemotherapy doesn’t hugely increase survival. While dogs typically live only three to six months when treated conventionally, they’ll often live for more than a year when treated with this mushroom. Although the report doesn’t discuss quality of life, I have used this medicinal mushroom and several others in clinical practice for more than fifteen years and have never seen any adverse reactions, especially compared to those of chemotherapy.
How can results such as these be explained—what does science have to say about this? Nature determines how we interact with the world around us—what harms us, what has a neutral effect, and what makes us stronger. My definition of science in the field of medicine is simply man trying to figure out what nature has already created.
I explained to the students what cancer is in simple terms, and how today we’re looking for what cancer is out in the environment. Surprisingly, it doesn’t exist out there. Simply put, cancer is caused by normal cells that go haywire because the immune system is no longer functioning properly. In the early days of a mammalian embryo’s development, this organism is composed of numerous cells that are all exactly the same. Soon, however, the embryo goes through a miracle of nature called cell differentiation, in which different cell types begin to emerge and organize to form organs and structures in the developing fetus.
Again, simply speaking, cancer happens when something screws up this natural mechanism of cell differentiation. So, if we want to look for the cause of cancer in our animal companions and find the “cure,” we have to look at those things that have fouled up natural development and normal cellular repair and replacement in their bodies. There are three key factors:
• Genetics
• Vaccinations
• Food
I reminded the audience that I was not there to cause controversy—I was there for each of them to learn and take away something new. When it comes to vaccinating animals, for example, I told them, “I am not anti-vaccination. I am pro-sanity. I feel that through the practice of standard vaccination protocols, we’re actually violating our Hippocratic oath as doctors to do no harm.” I then presented statistical evidence that a number of vaccines don’t need to be given to dogs and cats every three years—as common veterinary practice today prescribes—and definitely not every year.
Unbeknownst to many veterinarians, standard vaccine potencies can be up to ten times what a Great Dane needs—imagine the effect of such a powerful substance on a much-smaller dog receiving the same exact dose. And many veterinarians continue to vaccinate sick animals when, on the package insert of every vaccine, it clearly states that the product is intended for use in healthy animals only. I suggested that Cornell should conduct scientific studies on the efficacy of vaccines and their adverse sequelae—and especially on the dose-to-weight relationship.
In 1978, my license to practice was verbally threatened for my treating of arthritic dogs with glucosamine sulfate. Now, supplement producers sell many millions of dollars’ worth of glucosamine-type supplements every year, and no one’s license is being threatened for recommending it. And guess who conducted the groundbreaking study demonstrating that CBD oil is effective for pain relief in arthritic dogs? Ironically, it was a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Joseph Wakshlag at Cornell University, and the study was published just a few months before my presentation. As I told the attendees in the auditorium, “It’s time for you to listen.”
Many of the students who attended my presentation were floored—they loved it. My hope is that they will really listen—and then act by bringing their desire to learn this emerging information to the faculty, administration, and board of trustees. The health, happiness, and well-being of many thousands of dogs and cats will soon be in their hands.
MY SWISS VISION
Years ago, soon after I joined my brother’s veterinary practice in Yorktown Heights, New York, and then became a partner, one of my clients was Edgar Bronfman Sr. Edgar’s family made its fortune primarily through their alcohol-distilling company, Seagram, and Edgar served for a time as chairman of the company.
Edgar’s son Matthew, who was living in Washington, D.C., had a young Labrador named Taylor, after Taylor Vineyards, which was one of the family’s wine companies. The dog had a degenerative, heredity shoulder condition called osteochondritis dissecans, and the known effective treatment at the time was surgical repair. It was like hip dysplasia, which was a common degenerative condition of the hips in those days—especially with German shepherds.
Edgar had Taylor flown to New York for a consultation. I examined the dog and put him on a regimen of supplements. A few months later, I got a call from Matthew. He told me that a new X-ray of Taylor’s shoulder showed it was back to normal—100 percent.
“What are you doing?” he asked me.
“You know, I’m starting to get into alternative medicine.”
“No, no, no. What are you doing? Can I come up and visit you?”
“Absolutely.”
During Matthew’s visit, we talked about the holistic-pet-care company I was starting with my family, and Matthew told me he was interested in investing in it. The first investment of $30,000 from the Bronfman family helped start the family-based company called Lick Your Chops. The first store was built, then several others followed.
When Matthew Bronfman married his first wife, Fiona, he flew me to Gstaad, Switzerland, for the wedding, all expenses paid. We were in the Swiss Alps overlooking a beautiful mountain valley.
One morning, after days of partying, I decided to go for a run—I desperately needed to get some oxygen inside me to clear my head. I turned on my Sony Walkman and ran up a beautiful Alpine mountain road near where we were staying. All of a sudden, two little dogs came flying down a driveway at me, barking viciously. I stopped in my tracks and looked directly at them.
My mind was still a little fuzzy, but in a serious tone I asked the dogs, “Excuse me? Do you know who you are barking at?” They froze. “You’re barking at the person who is someday going to save your entire kingdom. So, if I were you, I would just stop and go back to your house.”
Although I was just kidding around, to my amazement the two dogs put their tails between their legs and slowly sauntered up the driveway back to the house.
As crazy as this may sound, that’s the vision I had that revealed to me the person I was about to become. My purpose in life was to save the lives of animals—as many as I possibly could during my life. I didn’t know that it was going to take me forty-five or fifty years to get there, but it did.
As I was going through life building my veterinary practice, things got tough. My brother and I sold our old practice when Bronfman agreed to invest because we were going to create this huge business with Lick Your Chops. But the funding didn’t come through in time—we were deeply indebted, debt beyond what you can imagine. My brother set up a small veterinary practice and started to see animals in his garage just to make ends meet because he had a family of four to support. It became so popular that he rented space at a kennel, which became the current Smith Ridge Veterinary Center (which was located on Smith Ridge Road in Salem, New York).
Being single, I was doing relief work. I was so broke, I would get up Monday morning at 4:30 a.m., cook eight ears of corn, brown rice, and lettuce, then go to my first job all day Monday and the ER Monday night. I would drive two hours up to my friend Howard’s practice outside Woodstock and work all day Tuesday. I drove down to Queens Boulevard and worked the ER in Queens, where my life was always at risk, all Tuesday night. Then Wednesday I would work at my brother’s clinic. I would work those three days in a row, maybe getting four to six hours of sleep in three days if I was lucky, and I would make enough money to pay all my bills and buy gas, corn, brown rice, and lettuce. That’s how my life was, and that’s when my Swiss vision really kicked in—over and over—keeping me going through those difficult times.
Then finally, when funding came in, my brother’s expenses were covered. He sold Smith Ridge Veterinary Center to me and I took it over in 1984. But life just kept getting tougher and tougher for me. I was working extremely hard, and every time I took on a new case and treated the animal with nontraditional means, I felt I was putting my license at risk. Because of that, I wasn’t able to charge as much for my services as regular veterinarians were charging for accepted, conventional treatments. Pursuing a career in conventional veterinary medicine would have made things easy for me. Give a shot of cortisone and annual vaccines, remove a tumor, or put a dog or cat on antibiotics to provide some temporary relief.
I was constantly tempted to give up my integrative veterinary practice, to take the easy way out. But every time I decided that it was finally time to give it up, I would go back to the vision I had had in Gstaad and say to myself, “That vision was real and if you give up, that vision becomes not real, so you can’t give up.” That vision kept me going through decades of hell until I came out the other side.
THE NEW PRINCIPLES OF SPIRITUAL HEALING
In my first book, I included the Principles of Natural Healing—a list of eighteen principles I believe are the root of all we need to know and practice in holistic medicine. This list came to me in another vision I had after I signed my first book deal. The initial drafts weren’t going so well—the text sounded too much like other books and theories that had been out there for eons. The deadline to submit the manuscript to the publisher was fast approaching, and I was getting increasingly desperate to find the breakthrough I needed to move forward.
Finally I said, “I need to get away so I can think!” I flew to Jamaica with my friend Darrel where we commenced three days of relaxing fun in the sun.
Fortunately, whatever was blocking my creative process was exorcised from my brain during those three days. On the morning of the fourth day in Jamaica, I told Darrel, “Leave me alone—go have a good time. Go running, go to the beach, hit the bars. I don’t care. It’s time for me to start my book.”
I walked over to a cliff overlooking the ocean with a pad of paper, a pen, and a bottle of local Dragon Stout beer. I sat on a little white bench for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, hitting myself in the head in hopes of sparking a revelation. Everything I could think of to write was the same old, same old. My page was still blank, and I struggled to reach deep inside me for the answer.
As I watched the waves crash onto the rocks below, I asked myself, “What do you want to say that’s so different? I know it’s inside you.”
After quite a few minutes more, and several more punches to the head and swigs out of my beer bottle, I picked up my pen, and like in the film The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille, the eighteen principles flowed out onto the pad of paper—one right after another. I didn’t even think about what I was writing. It was as if I were being guided by some mysterious, unknown force. From that moment, with my principles to guide me, the book unfolded naturally—the roots of the entire book were contained in those eighteen principles.
As I worked to prepare the book you hold in your hands, another sixteen principles came to me, which I call the New Principles in the Spirit of Healing. These new principles aren’t meant to replace the eighteen principles outlined in my first book—they are a supplement to them.
As you read through these principles, keep in mind that they apply just as much to our animal companions as they do to ourselves—especially in conjunction with the first eighteen principles in The Nature of Animal Healing.
1. My definition of science in the field of medicine is simply man trying to figure out what nature has already created.
2. With any degenerative condition, stability in the face of expected decline is actually improvement.
3. Hope consistently precedes healing.
4. Our companion animals are spiritual beings—perhaps more than we’ll ever understand as humans.
5. When considering the big picture of existence and healing, spirituality is superior to physicality. This is more commonly expressed as “mind over matter.”
6. The best solution is often the simplest one.
7. When designing programs to reestablish health, a vital ingredient in most all is time. Unlike the quick-fix goal of most conventional treatments, healing is a process that takes time.Corollary: Have patience with patients.
8. Before disease, there was health.
9. Disease is not something that just happens to you or your animal companions, but something that you allow to happen, either consciously or unconsciously.
10. An illness is nature’s way of creating the fundamental conditions necessary for healing called homeostasis.
11. Cancer is a confusion of nature caused mostly by man to now, in too many cases, outsmart himself.
12. The most predictable thing about cancer, patient to patient, is that it remains mostly unpredictable.
13. Health is not rocket science. Unfortunately, this is what medicine has become.
14. Our animal companions tell us what’s wrong with them—we simply need to “listen” closely and openly.
15. The immune system functions at its best when it is in a completely unaltered state.
16. Everything necessary for healing is built into every living being. It’s up to us to remove the obstacles to healing instead of adding new ones.
NEXT STOP BOULDER?
One of my best friends when I was in college at Cornell was Steve Rosdal. He graduated a year before I did and ended up working on Wall Street. After a couple years of that, he realized he couldn’t carve out a good life doing what he was doing. So, he decided to escape from New York, move to Denver, and start over.
I always had a strong affinity for Colorado, especially Boulder. I thought it was an enlightened place to live and work, and its location right next to the Rocky Mountains was breathtaking. After I wrapped up my studies at Cornell and worked for a year in Horseheads, New York, I decided to move to Boulder and start a holistic veterinary clinic. I was serious. I began planning the move in earnest and I put in an order with the post office to have my mail forwarded to Steve’s house in Denver. I was going to live with him while I scoped out the area.
Just days before my move date, however, my brother called and asked, “I want to give you my practice—would you like it?” My brother had the opportunity to buy a prestigious veterinary clinic in Bedford, which was more affluent and closer to where he lived. The veterinarian had died suddenly, and the practice went up for sale. The vet’s widow was devastated, but she met my brother and sister-in-law, loved them, and offered to sell the practice to my brother. Once he took over the new practice, he would sell me his practice cheap.
I was excited by the offer—my brother had built an incredible reputation in the community as a veterinarian, and it would be a great opportunity for me because I would be able to run my own practice. At least that was the plan. My brother was supposed to put a down payment on the clinic on a Friday afternoon, but the widow was still distraught, and my brother didn’t want to bug her about it over the weekend. Another veterinarian caught wind of the situation. He swooped in, gave the woman a down payment that weekend, and my brother lost out. I ended up joining my brother’s practice, and I forgot all about making the move to Boulder. At that time I started to learn and practice the alternative treatments that became the foundation of my life’s work.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Much has changed in the twenty or so years since my first book was published. The kind of integrative veterinary medicine that I’ve been practicing during that time—and that almost cost me my license in the years before that book was published—has gained widespread acceptance. Alternative treatments for dogs and cats such as nutraceuticals and acupuncture are widely available if not yet commonplace, and society is beginning to understand that overvaccination is the root of many medical problems in our animal companions.
A company called Nutramax came out with the first well-known glucosamine supplement for humans, which is called Cosamin. Today, you can go to Costco and buy as much as you want of this “joint health” supplement. However, Nutramax eventually took a big step forward. They did a ton of research into treating animals with glucosamine and subsequently developed a supplement for dogs and cats called Cosequin, which is still widely available today. They put the science behind it, demonstrating that it works. Nutramax also created a supplement called Denamarin, and I estimate that at least half of all veterinarians prescribe it for animals with any kind of liver issue.
Slowly—as Cornell’s CBD study clearly illustrates—the world of conventional veterinary medicine is waking up to the awesome potential of alternative treatments. These are the future of our field, and I’m extremely proud to have played a role in this transformation. It wasn’t easy, and more than once I seriously considered retreating back to the comfort of the conventional medical establishment. But that just wasn’t for me—I knew when I had my vision in Switzerland that my purpose was clearly laid out for me: to help save our favorite kingdom.
The ideas I wrote about in my first book were mostly my opinions—they didn’t yet have a firm basis in science. But these opinions were so strong within me that I knew they were right, and I knew they needed to be shared. Today, they’re no longer just my opinions—there is a large body of scientific and medical documentation on these treatments, on diet, on supplements, and on the inappropriateness of how we still standardly vaccinate. So, my role has changed from voicing my opinions into the void, to being a voice for the animals and a spokesperson for the available truth.
In this book, you’ll learn the complete unvarnished truth as it exists today about the integrative veterinary practices that I pioneered, and that have opened the door for exploration by so many others into the vast field of alternative therapies. I will present the latest research—some of the university and pharmaceutical-company studies—and I’ll take you to the leading edge of innovative, new treatments that you probably aren’t yet familiar with. Throughout, I’ll tell you a few of my own remarkable personal stories of animals and their people.
In the chapters that follow, I’m going to give you the latest advice, information, and treatment protocols that will help your animal companion live a longer and more fulfilling life. We’ll cover everything from the basics of animal biology and psychology, to raw food, cancer, nutraceuticals, cutting-edge therapies, the spiritual connection we share with our dogs and cats—and much, much more.
Throughout, I look forward to opening your eyes to the tremendous power of nature, the spiritual world that our animal companions inhabit, and the role both these play within our human race.
Copyright © 2021 by Martin Goldstein.
