The Root Causes of Diseases
Nancy Scanlan, DVM

Integrative medicine is always looking for the absolute root cause of a disease. For example, in humans, shingles is a painful disease that may appear years after a person had chicken pox. The virus which causes shingles is never completely destroyed when chicken pox symptoms go away. Instead, it goes to live inside nerve cells, and when a person gets older, it may cause painful inflamed skin eruptions known as shingles.

So is inflammation the cause of shingles? No – it is a result of the disease (although chronic inflammation does play a part in the cause of many diseases).

Is the virus the root cause of shingles? No – although its activity causes those signs, the reason it appears in older people is that their immune system is weaker and can no longer keep the virus locked up in its home inside nerve cells. Conventional medicine has finally recognized that this is the primary problem, and has created a vaccine to try to stimulate the immune system to fight off the virus. But that is only effective in about 50% of cases. Stronger immune systems can be stimulated enough to fight it off. Weaker immune systems still have problems. Conventional medicine does not yet recognize complementary ways to help weak immune systems become stronger.

Conventional medicine also has a near miss when treating mild form of Reactive Respiratory Syndrome. People with this problem start having breathing problems that feel like asthma: they can’t get enough air, they feel like their lungs aren’t expanding enough, and that their airways are not opening up. These problems come and go, like asthma does. But if you ever run into this, your doctor can tell if it is true asthma by measuring the oxygen levels in your blood. With an asthma attack, the levels go down. With the Syndrome, they stay normal.

The whole thing starts with a mild runny nose and post nasal drip, from a mild cold or allergy. There are a few white blood cells in that drip – not enough for you to see, but just enough to cause inflammation wherever they go. The nose is slightly inflamed, and the next step is a mild sore throat. Off and on, very mild, nothing to worry about. Except the throat has those same cells, which migrate down into the lungs, where they finally get a big enough reaction that the lungs become inflamed.

Using inhalers at this point can make things worse and turn it all into real asthma. But if you fix the runny nose instead, the whole thing goes away. That is a perfect example of both treating the root cause, and using a drug that makes a chronic disease worse instead of better. Fortunately, current medicine recognizes this, although not all doctors do.

Using Chinese medicine to recognize the pattern (like the runny nose problem) that is at the root of the disease, is one way to deal with other chronic diseases such as Cushings Disease. Sometimes we can track a problem piece by piece, such as the time that I saw a dog with skin cancer on one hind leg and arthritis on the opposite hip. Because of the arthritis, the dog put more weight on the good leg. That made the good leg hurt, at the hock. The dog licked the hock constantly. (He was a Doberman, and Dobies are famous for licking holes in themselves.) Cancer is often associated with inflammation. All that licking kept that hock inflamed, and cancer developed. I treated the hip, the Dobie stopped licking his leg, and the cancer went away. So did the big sore that had covered that leg for years. Root cause: bad hip.

Why don’t more veterinarians use integrative medicine? They are waiting for the proof, especially in the form of research articles. Dr. Bannink has a great research project that needs to be funded. It has a method of treating hemangiosarcoma, a disease with a survival time of just months. With her treatment, dogs have survived for years. We have just started our Winter Fundraiser, and we have a pledge to match donations from pet owners, up to $25,000, and from veterinarians, for an additional $25,000.

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What makes integrative veterinarians different than conventional veterinarians? They adopt new ideas earlier. And they accept “it works” as sufficient proof. Conventional veterinarians, including many specialists, do what they are taught in veterinary school: wait for the research, wait for the specialists, wait for the veterinary schools to demonstrate beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that this new thing works, that it does not interfere with anything, and that it is not toxic. (Or if it is toxic, like chemotherapy, that the toxicity is worth it because the chance of dying from side effects is less than the chance of dying from the disease – cancer.) Veterinary schools beat fear into our heads. That is what we are taught, so I cannot fault conventional veterinarians if they would rather not try our methods. I have a problem with people who attack those of us who have success with our methods.

We are also taught that we must know what we are treating. We have to have proof in the form of laboratory tests or x-rays or something else that says yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt this is what we are dealing with. That way they will know exactly what to do because they can look it up in a book or in research papers. But a lot of problems we see as integrative veterinarians are either something not described in books or journals. Or they are described but they do not respond to anything, even things the specialists know about that the rest of us do not.

Richard Palmquist, DVM, GDVCHM, ACVCHM

5.24.17

Time flies. It's hard to believe that I will soon be finishing my term as president of AHVMF.org. The state of California mandates that no executive member of a nonprofit can serve more than six years, so I must retire from my position, but have no fear I will remain committee chair of research and will be actively involved in other foundation functions including fundraising and study development.

Six years ago this foundation was a dream. Many people called it a crazy dream. Some called it a dangerous dream, but six of us decided natural medicine was worth working for, so we began. 

We sought out experts in the area who told us that what we were doing was difficult, unlikely to succeed. They said our mission was too broad, our resources were too small, and that it was unlikely the public would support us. They said we would be lucky to raise $10,000 a year.

They said it was impossible.