Alternative medicine is enjoying a boom as people start to take control of their own lives. As an alternative medical practitioner, a homeopath, I am very excited about this. When people take control of their own lives, there is no limit to what becomes possible. The limitations occur when you hand over that control to others. No one else but you, has your own best interests so much to heart.
Once you start taking control of your own life, you start to question what’s best for your family, including your pets.
You might now be asking yourself what could be the best alternative medicine for dogs.
There are many different alternative medicine modalities about and you need to do a bit of research to decide what is most appropriate. There’s homeopathy, reiki, naturopathy, Chinese medicine, osteopathy, chiropractic, flower essences, herbs, acupuncture or pressure, massage, Bowen therapy, to mention just a few. Many of these modalities will only be able to work in a limited way. For instance (and I’m no masseuse, so could be wrong), massage will probably only be good for strained muscles. And, although some can act on a deep level, they can be slow to show results, such as flower essences.
And alternative medicine for dogs, really starts with their diet. If you’re feeding your dog an unhealthy diet, it doesn’t really matter what modality of health care you use – it’s not going to bear fruit. “You are what you eat.”
Commercial dog food have few regulations and even fewer which are enforced. From the poor quality ‘meat’ by-products, to the nutritionless filler, to the dangerous preservatives, your dog is slowly being poisoned. Label claims of ‘preservative free’ or ‘natural’ are largely meaningless.
Once you start feeding your dog a wholesome and REALLY natural food, you will see huge improvements in health. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
But sometimes, you need to do more. Then you need to scour what’s available in alternative medicine for dogs.
As a homeopath, you could say I’m biased (I agree!), but out of them all, the alternative medicine for dogs I consider has the greatest breadth and depth of real healing, is homeopathy.
Homeopathy has the potential to deal with ailments as diverse as ligament damage, to heart disease, from an embedded grass seed to depression. The only areas where I consider medical services are required is the setting of a broken bone and the stitching up of extensive wounds.
I don’t know of any other alternative medicine for dogs, where all this is possible. And homeopathy addresses the cause, rather than the effect.
Lets look at that for a minute. Imagine a woman has just given birth, and has since developed haemorrhoids, or piles. Now there is a common homeopathic remedy for piles called Hamamelis. And this may well help. But it’s unlikely to cure. So you might have to keep taking it for a long time.
There’s another common homeopathic remedy called Pulsatilla. And this helps with many ailments that develop from childbirth, including piles. Taking Pulsatilla is more likely to cure them for good.
So if you can treat the cause, expect outstanding results. A permanent cure is the aim.
One of the things I love about treating animals is their desire to help in the choosing of the right remedy. Most dogs are pretty outgoing and will make it very clear when you’ve selected the right remedy – they’ll lick the bottle, their lips or your hand, they’ll sit expectantly and wag their tail, they’ll look interested and attentive.
If, on the other hand, you selected the wrong remedy, they’ll turn their head away, walk off, perhaps even snarl at you if you persist.
To me, their body language is very clear. You really don’t need to be an animal communicator.
Once you have gained a bit of an understanding of what’s available, choosing an holistic vet, for the more difficult ailments, who practices alternative medicine for dogs becomes easier, and you become involved with your dog’s treatment.
I am passionate about your right of freedom to choose. But to choose, you have to know something about the subjects you want to choose between. So you need to listen to both, or all, sides of every aspect of every junction in your life that offers you that choice. Alternative medicine for dogs gives you plenty of choice!
If you are a celiac, your miracle cure is under way – being trialed in Melbourne Australia from April 2009! It could conceivably desensitize people with celiac disease to the point that the villi in their small intestine are not damaged by the gluten protein. However with the need for extensive testing in this three phase trial, the vaccine may not be ready for release for several years.
Before we go into the details of such a cure it should be noted that this vaccine might not be a ‘magic bullet’ that makes people permanently immune to the gluten protein, it might ‘only’ desensitize them. Also be aware that if you choose to undertake the ‘therapy’ there are no guarantees of how you will react, and the only way to regularly check to see if you have been ‘cured’ would be regular intestine biopsies. As it is known that some people take over two years to heal their intestines from gluten damage, how risky will this strategy be? It is expected that testing will be extensive so these questions may all sit under the ‘devil’s advocate’ category, and all may be well.
An even more philosophical question is what effect covering up the cause of your disease will have on your body. Books have been written that suggest that it is the increased gluten potency in wheat and other gluten grains as well as increased use in manufactured foods that has led to an overdose of gluten. Our bodies then pass a ‘tipping point’ where our genetic predisposition to CD turns into an active disease. If this is true, how wise would it be to continue ingesting unnaturally high levels of gluten, once ‘cured’ just because we can? Sure it would make life simpler not following a gluten free diet, however maybe we should wait for gluten to be decreased at the source, the growing fields, before we return to a gluten filled diet.
Different types of celiac disease identified
With all these issues under consideration, I am sure that every celiac would still be interested in a ‘cure’. A July 2007 article based on research conducted in Victoria, Australia, showed that “Celiac disease – is strongly associated with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) DQ2 and to a lesser extent with HLA DQ8.”
“HLA genes are part of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which plays a pivotal role in the immune system. HLA-DQ2 mediated celiac disease is common in people of European ancestry, with about 90 per cent of sufferers positive for DQ2. Another five per cent possess HLA DQ8. In China and East Asia, DQ2 genes are rare while DQ8 genes are as common as in Europe.”
So it appears that this preliminary research has been able to isolate two main versions of celiac disease. However the molecular workings of the immune response in the two antigens appear to be very different. The researchers discovered that T-cells in people with DQ8-associated celiac disease reacted quite differently to the small proteins in gluten than the T-cells in people with the DQ2 form of the disease.
“At the moment a gluten-free diet is the only treatment for celiac disease but nearly half the people on the diet still have damage to their small intestine. Consequently other therapies, including a vaccine and three different drugs, are in various stages of development. The research team believes celiac disease might be the first example of an immune disease where treatments are customized according to the genetic make-up of the patient.”
The celiac vaccine discovery
The discovery that lead to the creation of the vaccine was that the one critical part of wheat gluten protein that was toxic was the common genetic version (HLA DQ2) of celiac disease. “As much as the identity of the toxic component of gluten was important, it was the way in which it was found that has proven to be even more important. By eating gluten in wheat, rye, or barley for three days (even a single meal will suffice in some people), immune cells (T cells) that damage the small intestine are mobilized into blood for a few short days. The T cells in blood can be monitored and analyzed to define what part of gluten they recognize. The parts of gluten recognized by the vast majority of T cells involved in celiac disease can be condensed to a few “short” fragments of gluten that remain after its digestion in the gut. These gluten fragments can be synthesized using fairly standard chemistry and are the basis for the celiac vaccine.”
The Celiac Vaccine Trials
The original research began at Oxford England in 1997. The work continued in Australia in 2002 and by April 2009 Bob Anderson from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical research (Melbourne, Australia) will commence the first world trials of a celiac vaccine that could reduce or eradicate the need for being gluten free. In fact Bob Anderson calls the vaccine a “next-generation desensitization therapy” that has been successful in mice and is soon to be tested on celiacs.
“The vaccine will be tested on 40 volunteers with celiac disease over 11 months to establish that it does not harm them. In a subsequent phase 2 trial, which is designed to find out if the treatment is effective, volunteers will receive the treatment and then be challenged with foods containing gluten. Their immune response and intestines will then be examined to see if a tolerance to gluten has developed. The therapy involves repeatedly injecting solutions of gluten at increasing concentrations. The aim is to desensitize the subjects slowly, in a similar way to hay fever and dust allergy desensitization treatments.”
Testing process
“For a new drug to be accepted for use in people in Australia, Europe, or North America it must have progressed successfully from Phase 1 (safety) studies usually involving up to about 30 volunteers, to Phase 2 (efficacy) studies to show that “it works” in people with the medical condition of interest (typically about 200 volunteers in several locations around the world), and to Phase 3 (similar to Phase 2 but involving several thousand volunteers in many sites around the world).”
The celiac vaccine future
Due to difficulties in funding, Bob Anderson (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute) co-founded a commercial company called Nexpep to develop the vaccine. Nucleus Network, Centre for Clinical Studies (CCS) in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, will be conducting the Phase 1 clinical trial.
The difficulty he has faced, besides the technical issues, is the low diagnosis level of celiac disease and the mass of associated symptoms has made a vaccine cure unattractive to traditional pharmaceutical companies. These companies always prefer well defined markets to accurately forecast payback periods for their R&D and marketing expenses.
The facts are that for this vaccine to prove financially viable, The US will need to approve the drug and doctors and celiacs will need to accept the treatment. One report estimates that only 600,000 people are diagnosed with celiac disease (out of the 5 million with celiac disease in North America and Europe).
Compounded to the funding challenges is that previously, globally, there have only been three “randomized, controlled” studies of the gluten free diet – one in children and two in adults – the largest with 57 participants.”
The assessment of the vaccine treatment will require repeated endoscopy and collection of small intestine biopsies which are expensive and un-enjoyable for volunteers. However a recent trial in Italy has shown that biopsies are still the only ‘almost’ guaranteed method of assessing gluten damage. The study findings showed that “two years after adopting a gluten free diet, about half those people diagnosed with celiac disease continued to have villous atrophy as severe as when they were first diagnosed. Only about one in five of those with severe intestinal damage (villous atrophy) on a gluten free diet had raised (abnormal) blood levels of transglutaminase antibody, meaning that standard blood tests to monitor disease activity were relatively ineffective.”
So while the development of this vaccine is an important step in potentially eradicating celiac disease, philosophical questions still remain as issues for the long term efficacy of the vaccines. As an Australian first, this research is applauded by the gluten free community. We wish the researchers and medical staff all of the best in demystifying this illusive disease.
Article references are available on the gluten free pages website.
The growth of alternative medicine over the past few decades has been rapid and the number of alternative medicine practitioners grows by the day. With thousands of private complementary health practitioners and an increase in GPs offering alternative therapies there is no doubting its popularity and continued movement toward professional healthcare validation. However the question about alternative medicine remains – does it work? Acupuncture, reflexology and therapeutic touch are now non-conventional therapies people will consider having when thinking beyond conventional medical practices.
Certainly if you posed the question of whether alternative medicine works to people in the Far East the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’. Many alternative medicine techniques and therapies began in places like China and India centuries ago and are integral to their healthcare systems. With that degree of use and such a rich history there must be a high level of confidence in its effectiveness.
If you speak to many physicians the argument against alternative medicine is that it is not proven to work. This is a somewhat blinkered opinion as it is based on a comparison with traditional pharmaceutical drug testing. Before drugs can be prescribed they must go through rigorous clinical trials using a broad cross-section of society and performed over a period of years under the supervision of trained research teams. The industry goes to great lengths to highlight this clinical process and show that the evidence is scientific fact. But alternative medicine has been put through equally rigorous tests by research teams around the world; it’s just not as well documented.
Only now are we beginning to see the outcomes of these tests as demand for alternative medicine increases. And as demand increases, so the clinical trials into complementary and alternative therapies will increase. We should also be careful to dismiss practices that have been used successfully for thousands of years in other countries.
Another argument against alternative medicine is that evidence is anecdotal and based purely on personal experience of a therapy. But then the same argument could be true of conventional drug treatment. It is only because a clinical trial has taken place that the drug is deemed to work for everyone. That’s not always the case. How often has someone told you to take a certain drug for an ailment as it worked for them only to find that it didn’t work for you? It’s true that certain conditions require traditional treatment but that’s not to say that alternative medicine cannot be used alongside it. A popular benefit with alternative medicine is that it doesn’t have the nasty side-effects or discomfort that pharmaceutical drugs can have.
Alternative medicine is effective and can work for you
Alternative medicine is matter of choice. There are many therapies and techniques to choose from that can fit in with your ideas about health and well-being. Alternative medicine can help with a variety of conditions illnesses and approaches health in a holistic way. Concern for the body as a whole and the use of natural herbal remedies really can target a specific illness. So to answer the question – yes, alternative medicine does work if you find the therapy that works for you.