Raw Pet Medics Discuss the Controversial Topic of Homeopathy and Canine Health

Good morning, everybody.

Hello, good morning.

You are back with a slightly depleted Raw Pet Medics. Brendan has seen fit to disappear to Canada for 4 weeks. Good man, he deserves the break, and he's going to have an amazing time. They've actually gone into the wilderness, and actually they've set— oh, oh no, he's about to join our show.

He's here, special guest, special guest announcing.

It's 5 AM wherever he is. Look at the bay, it's in Canada.

Show off, show off. That's not your room, that's somebody else's room. You're doing that from the breakfast table.

Where?

That's just a poster.

We can see it's just a poster, mate. You're downtown Calgary or something. Don't give us that.

I wish I was paid millions every year. That's not fair. I go on holidays to Cork and Kerry and sunny Galway. Graham goes to Canada for 4 weeks and wherever you're going next. Where are you going next, Graham? You're going on a seaplane. I always wanted to go on a seaplane. Where's that going to?

Yeah, we go to a nice resort in the middle of, well, it's up north of us from here, so hopefully get a lot more nature, a little seaplane. We've just been watching them take off from the bay just outside.

Nice.

So yeah, it'd be Brilliant.

Oh yeah, it was really lovely of you to send— uh, well, actually, Chris, your wife, sent us this picture. She managed to get a picture of you in the forest, and we, we really appreciate you sending it through to us.

If only I had a six-pack like that.

You do.

I was against putting up that picture, by the way. I wanted to go with something more, but I realized You went with— put you to shame. Yeah, you wouldn't pass at the moment. I have a baby belly though, uh, struggling to shift it. So that sounds nice. Thanks for joining us, Bren, all the way from Canada. Thanks everyone for, uh, for coming along tonight. Nick is in charge, uh, tonight, so, uh, hence we've got this strange-looking orange border around us. But fair play, Nick, for getting us going. Uh, it's not easy on the technical, so, uh, that's his design. That's— yeah, that's perfect. It'll do the job. Sunny. And listen, usually we have letters scrolling across the bottom saying what's on tonight. You know, we're going to be talking about homeopathy and a few other bits and pieces, and these are the two top vets in the country for that subject, so I don't think Brent could stay away, to be honest with you. So thanks for coming tonight, and we would normally be scrolling across the link to our Patreon page, patreon.com/rawpetmedics. If you can help us out with the price of a cup of coffee or a pint to keep the show on the road, we very much appreciate it. Everybody, everybody that's been doing that so far, we see you and we thank you. And if you can, great, if you can't, no sweat at all, no stress at all. But yeah, so what's been happening, Nick? You are up the walls with a move, aren't you?

So we had 2 weeks in Egypt, and we timed it deliberately, obviously, so that we left on a Tuesday and we arrived back on a Tuesday, so that we had 3 weeks without you guys. Oh yeah, what can I say? It was bliss. I was blessed. We're trying to get rid of Brendan, and he's there still like a bad spot.

I'm not here for long, only a little bit.

Okay, we'll get the Good stuff out here. It's great to see you. Yeah, absolutely. I met this fantastic girl yesterday, lady, and she was a behaviorist. She is a behaviorist. Met two behaviorists. It's always interesting talking to behaviorists and getting what's going on. And she's into pain and behavior, so that's her forte, and she does a lot of work in that. I would say the name of her company if I could remember now, but I can't, so— but I will say it later. But she was asking about Duddy, how's Duddy getting on? I said, look, he's still his same agitated little self and she was asking questions about it and she goes, have you explored pain in this dog at all? And I was like, no, he's fine, he's absolutely fine, he looks fine because we had a major back operation when he was 1, he's now 7. How's his gait, how's his walk? And I said, oh, it's pretty bad, he's pretty wobbly now, it looks pretty funny when you see him walking down the street. So send me a few videos and she goes, there's a very simple test for this and we don't want everybody to start doing this on their dogs, but she said everything that I said was just ringing alarm bells for her. So I've got great hope that that she said, why don't we try some simple pain relief, some very simple pain relief in this dog for a few days, and if any change is made, get him checked out by a vet, get his back checked out by somebody and get a physio to check him out. And I'm like, God, yeah, obviously, why wouldn't I give his back the support that I would probably be recommending for anybody at this, not quite middle age, I don't want to think that, but you know, he's 7 years old. So I'm full of hope that maybe actually Duddy's absolute craziness for only little parts of the time might be actually a bit of agitation from the discomfort feels in his back, and that's why he's on his toes all the time. And I wonder, would that be it? What do you think, guys? Have you ever heard of such a thing? Would you see that?

Yeah, I think pain trials, it's a brilliant idea. We do it in horses all the time.

That's what she said.

You look at a horse and you think, is he lame, is he not? And so you put him on Bute for 10 days, 2 weeks, and if he becomes sound and is suddenly more joyous, then he's got pain. Either pain in the leg or in the back or in the neck or what have you, because it's very difficult to tell.

Wow.

With horses horses if they're in pain or not, even more than dogs, because it's more difficult to probe at a deep level. So we use pain trials all the time. So I think it's great that you're going down that line. I'm not a big fan of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, but I think to ask the question, are you fundamentally in pain or are you fundamentally not in pain, I think it's brilliant.

Yeah, I think generally as well with dogs, I mean, we're seeing a lot of this, and I wonder whether that's why so many people are using bits of CBD, bits of gabapentin, and things like that in some of these behavioral cases, just to see how much pain is involved in those cases. So I think definitely it's worth— if any of you guys have a problem that's ongoing, you've done all of the training, etc., and you find that there's something always reverts them back to that excess sympathetic drive, do look at pain. Yes, that can be a big driver.

Yeah, a bit of paracetamol, lads. Is that okay? Small little bit of paracetamol, just plain paracetamol.

As a trial, I would never say permanently. There's lots of other great things herbal-wise to use. I always say to people, look, if you really want to rule it out and you want to make sure, then by all means use a very short course of a good pain relief and then sort of use that as your marker to sort of work out at which point you should be able to get any other complementary medicines to, or exceed, rather than just sort of depending on you know, that nonsteroidal or other pain relief for the rest of their lives, because I think that's not great for their health.

Yeah. Okay, cool. She said that different pain reliefs target different parts of the body. So she said some pain reliefs don't work on some parts of the body and others work much better. So just to put them on, one mightn't be exactly what you need. Like the lady is all over pain. I mean, she would talk rings around— so interesting. So I never even thought that. And she goes, oh, it explains a lot of behavior. And then the nerves that are connected all through the back, the vagus nerve hooked up over everything and wrapping around your, your, your laryngeal paralysis that Karen was talking about. It goes around that lobe. If you can damage it, you can get all sorts of issues. And Karen was saying things can pop up all over the body because, you know, this nerve is connected to everything and it goes up into the brain. So it's like, wow, yeah, why wouldn't it result in behavioral issues as well? Anyway, I just thought that was fantastic. I'm going to keep you posted on how I get on with the first few days, and then if I need something, I will use you as my free vets, as I always do. So, uh, yeah, listen, homeopathy, guys, this is a very, very big one. Does somebody want to start us off with a little bit of history of like where did this come about? Does anybody— do you guys have the history of that? Where did this medicine start?

Do you want to go with that? Because you're going to run off to some water ski plane to get to your— what's it, Grizzly Adams cabin in the woods.

I love the fact you guys are including me at this very short notice for these little bits. Oh, look, um, give us a few minutes. Here goes back, um, thousands of years ultimately, uh, with a principle of like treats like. So looking at, um, what medicines in nature would cause symptoms, by causing those symptoms you could often get those natural symptomatologies to be reversed by the body, almost letting the body recognize it and then power back against it to overwhelm both the medicine and the original disease. So that's one of the principles way back when, from Greek times, that was sort of named in there. On top of that, then probably the, the godfather, if you like, of homeopathy, people would refer to as Hahnemann, came along. But there were a few before him with Paracelsus and other people in that, that very sort of turn of the 16th, 17th centuries that were looking into homeopathy and, and potencies. And I think really Hahnemann was the guy. He's a doctor. He was effectively translating texts from Latin and Greek into German way back in sort of 1780s, 1790s, just to get himself through medical school. And he sort of came across a few of these things and he just really went to look at, you know, experimenting how he could get some of these medicines. So cinchona bark, you know, with malaria, sort of recognizing some of the slight similarities between how effective that medicine is and how actually that medicine could cause some of the symptoms that you'd get with malaria, which is a big issue in those days. And he experimented on his kids and himself and, you know, those around him with potencies. Not knowing anything about, you know, Avogadro's number at that stage. Okay. Just literally going, well, it's toxic and it's, it's really potent form. So let's dilute this. And he found that actually diluting it in certain ways actually revealed a better medicine. So he went through this potentization, which he sort of marked down as to how to do it, and then started to develop these remedies and remedy pictures. And it was an ever-evolving feast for him, you know, right through to, I think it was 1840-something that he, he finally did his final demise. And he was— even then there was an unpublished thing on chronic diseases that he'd written that didn't actually get published till into the, you know, 20th century, just because it was held on to by his family. And, you know, it was just one of those things that swept the world, you know, it was probably the biggest form of medicine in America at the turn of the sort of 1900s, way beyond what pharmaceuticals is now. So yeah, massive history behind homeopathy. And, you know, there's obviously a lot of skeptics going on out there because they can't get their heads around why it works. But that's not true science. True science is, well, let's see if it works. And if it works, then we've got to try and hypothesize how and slowly get to the answers to that. And I would never say that I've got the absolute answer to everything. I think what we've got to say here is, look, we see it work. We see it work day in, day out. It works. There's, there's studies done in plants using it in crops for improvements. If you say that those must have feelings and therefore they understand placebo, then, you know, you that's another factor in its own right. But we see it work in animals, we see it work in humans, in kids. I think, you know, it's got to be said, it's out there. And there's some great studies I know that you guys are going to go into just to show that. So I think certainly we need to, to explore this much more than is currently there.

What's the studies on plants, Brian? Can you remember one? Like what sort of stuff would they have been doing? Just growth rates or that kind of stuff?

They were literally looking at not so placebo effectively because they were looking at using sulfur and silica in the growth of lettuces on certain soils, all the way through to grain crops and looking at growth rates by giving them different remedies versus just placebo of plain water, you know, in spraying the crops and seeing the difference in the growth rates.

Wow, wow. There was, there was something you mentioned back there which is Avogadro's number, which for people that aren't familiar with it, that is 1 to the minus 23. So 0.000023, not 1. And they say if there's less than that, of that thing in the water, then that compound is not in the water. It's not better if the molecule is not there. That's the most dilute.

12C potency, is that right, Nick? Something like that? I can't remember now.

Is it 12C? Because it's 10 to the minus 23, isn't it? So It's— is it— I'm just— my maths is failing me here. So 10 to the 23, will you get to there with a 12? Is it a 12 or a 24 dilution? Anyway, it's very, very, very, very, very, very dilute. So we use, as homeopaths, we will use arsenic but in potency. We'll use strychnine in potency. We'll even use plutonium. And, you know, really hideously toxic. And also syphilis in potency. This is, this is, this is where these things came from. It's, you know, gonorrhea in potency. Yeah. Because what we find often is that the more potent the poison, the more potent the medicine. This is one of the beauties of homeopathy. And Conor, you, you said that you'd kind of frame some reference with this stuff, with your book.

Yeah.

And you want to just kind of get us started off before Brendan goes, maybe. Did you want to just give us— you said it, or so, minutes?

Yeah, I've got 7. Brendan, are you okay for 7 minutes? Are you gonna hang around for a bit longer, or, um, how are you fixed? Are you being someone?

I might, I might pause my camera for the 7 minutes because I want to listen to your, to your voice.

You've read this book inside out.

I'll still be in the background, yeah, just to criticize.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, thanks very much.

Numberjack shirt packed. Yeah, yeah, all right, go, go on and sharpen your axe, sharpen it.

The, uh, the two points about the dilution, like, you know, for me as a non-homeopathic person, but somebody that absolutely believes and have seen it, uh, firsthand on more than a dozen dogs, uh, it's, it's like venom and anti-venom. That makes perfect sense to people. You don't use a whole lot of venom in antivenom. I'm not even sure how they actually make that. But another more recent one was when, remember the Pfizer vaccine, hopefully that doesn't get us removed from Facebook, where they accidentally were using half the dose and they found it was more effective. And I just thought, wow, there's just so much stuff. Remember there was a huge amount of vials that went out and they discovered that half the dose was actually more effective. So these things about dosing is coming up now and again a little bit in our world of non-homeopathic stuff. Well, and the last thing I want to touch on what Brian said, there's a massive difference, which is exactly what I'm going to read out here. There's a huge difference between science and academia, and you're— we are being sold the idea that academia is science, and it's not the same thing. To be a scientist is somebody that finds something out, produces an experiment, very simple introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, presents it, and that thing is repeatable. So if a homeopathic medicine grows lettuces quicker, you can hand over the exact blueprints of that study and the next person will repeat that study. So the fact that it's repeatable, that's basic science. Academia is where a scientist publishes that in a journal for people to read, and that comes with an awful lot of issues. Certainly today, uh, we have like the pharma producing 95% of any of the drug studies that are coming out. So we have a huge problem with academia because we know the studies have big problems. We can't repeat a huge percentage of the studies, something like 70% of the studies of drugs that are coming out today are not repeatable. They don't get the same answer when they repeat them. So academia and science, two very different things. When a scientist says, you know, this hot-cold water therapy has done wonders for my dog's back, that's a perfectly scientific thing to say. It's nearly irrelevant that there isn't studies done. If somebody has been doing this on racehorses and it works, it's worth a bloody go. An anti-science thing to say would be rubbish. 'When I see academia, I'll believe it.' That's just, that's rubbish. It's the wrong way around. So anyway, here's a couple of pages I want to read out. 7 minutes, I timed myself already. So it was just 3 pages, and I called it 'All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others,' and I was targeting the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK, who I'm free to talk about in any way I like. And the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons have this subsidiary called RCVS Knowledge, and their motto is to advance the use of evidence-based veterinary medicine in veterinary practice. So that sounds fab, we all want a bit of that. And they do it via their journal Veterinary Evidence. So that all sounds good, no problem. And a few years ago they did a— they released a paper, and you can really see what sort of journal it is by the papers they release, although all journals have their own problems. And they were inventing the use of raw meaty bones in periodontal disease. And the two researchers discounted all the studies that exist to prove bones are very effective, such as, you know, 600 or 200 dogs followed for 6 years and the study in '67, all these huge studies. And they followed one study, and after examining one study, this paper concluded, um, until we know more, just to add in my own words, um, vets are recommended to rely on their clinical experience rather than the literature. That was the conclusion of the study. So instead of feeding raw meaty bones, they should rely on their clinical experience, which is raw meaty bones are dangerous, and rather than the literature. Okay, so that was the conclusion of the study. And then they did a study assessing the value of kibble to kidney disease, of higher protein diets to kidney disease, and again they use one study, and again they conclude vets should rely on their professional experience until more evidence is generated. And so a lot of vets are given a lot of kind of scope to use their experience. There's 50 homeopathic vets in the UK, okay? So these are professionally trained vets that are now doing an extra course to learn about homeopathy and are using it to a great extent. And those vets are being kind of, you know, chased around a bit. In 2016, there was a campaign run by 2 or 3 vets who I won't mention, just keep it off the air. But in 2016, via The Guardian and all the usual kind of papers that they use to promote their stuff, and they got 1,000 vets to sign it that these 50 vets were to be blacklisted if they recommended homeopathy ahead of conventional medicine. I believe that was the cut and thrust of it. I might be fuddy on those details, but the fact remains that the RCVS and these guys who have their own group extolling the benefits of evidence-based medicine back cereal-based dry food, and cereal-based dry food has not got a single study behind it. Saying it's more effective than the placebo, which in an animal's case would be his natural diet. In any head-to-head, a well-made raw dog food comes out on top. And now we've got slowly building evidence that raw dog food is less inflammatory and all sort of stuff. So we have evidence to the contrary, but dry food has not got any evidence behind it that it will be a superior diet to raw dog food. They never needed it, not a single study. So the RCVS is all about giving vets, you should use your experience rather than literature for bones and your experience rather than literature for protein and kidney disease, and of course for dry dog food, and of course when they were recommending annual boosters for already vaccinated dogs for viruses. All this nonsense that was never backed by science. But listen to the evidence behind homeopathy, okay? So the RTVS in 2017, a fierce statement saying homeopathy exists without a recognized body of evidence for its use. So that's terrifying. And of course the RTVS don't like that. They don't back any industry that doesn't do that. At least non-profitable ones. A recognized evidence base is a tricky one. How much evidence is required and recognized by whom? The fact remains there is adequate evidence supporting the use of homeopathy that should be at least— that should at least be stimulating further scientific investigation. In 2011, an independent report commissioned by the Swiss health authorities concluded there is sufficient evidence for the preclinical effectiveness and clinical efficacy of homeopathy for safety and economy compared with conventional treatment. In 2016, a comprehensive literature review, a review of all the papers of the peer-reviewed studies into the efficacy of homeopathy in replacing the use of antibiotics in cattle, pig, and poultry spanning 4 decades was published in the Veterinary Record. 48 publications produced 52 trials that were said to fulfill the necessary scientific criteria. 28 of these trials were apparently in favor of homeopathy, more than half, with 26 trials showing a significant higher efficacy. And that's in a, that's in a peer-reviewed journal done by peer-reviewed, evidence-based kind of scientists and whatnot. And people would say, ah, but it failed 45% of the time. And I go on to say, well, prescription drugs fail, you know, often 20, like 20% of drugs work in some patients, 30% of arthritis drugs, 35% of cancer drugs. Those sort of failures are permitted in conventional medicine. When homeopathy doesn't work 1 in 2 times for whatever reason, That is not permitted. So homeopathy has a lot of peer-reviewed scientists, but here was the juiciest bit that happened, okay, that I wanted to kind of call out. The, um, so the RCVS is not alone in its repression of homeopathy. The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council got itself in hot water recently when it was tasked with assessing the available evidence supporting the use of homeopathy. Their concluding write-up— it was not a published study as it was not submitted to peer review was entitled Evidence on the Effectiveness of Homeopathy for Treating Health Conditions. It argued against the effectiveness of homeopathy. However, discrepancies found in the work by various homeopathic research groups, including cherry-picked data from available evidence and a panel of homeopathic experts containing no actual homeopathy experts, a group that was chaired by a member of an anti-homeopathy lobby group, led to a public scrutiny of the piece as a whole. It soon came to light there was an earlier work that wasn't made public by the same group. It took 3 years, multiple Freedom of Information requests, and 2 members of the Australian Senate to force the NHMRC to admit the fact. Eventually, the original work was found. It was entitled The Effectiveness of Homeopathy: An Overview Review of Secondary Evidence, and dated 2012, and was finally published in 2019. In this report, it states— it stated there is encouraging evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy for 5 health conditions: and I'll go on. But anyway, the last bit was, to see this document finally see the light of day is a major win for transparency and public accountability and research. That was in their main paper there in Australia. So the fact remains that they are backing dry food, annual boosters. They say in their journals, oh, don't feed raw meaty bones until we have enough evidence. And all the things that cost us nothing that we can do ourselves, just— there's just quite not enough evidence, you know. And yet they back things like dry dog food. But for homeopathy, there will never be enough evidence. And I think the problem is homeopathy is as close to a dark art as people— because people are very— they don't understand, they find it hard to describe, they find it very hard to measure with the basic scientific tools we have today. It's like trying to bloody assess dark matter, which makes up 85% of the weight in our universe. We don't bloody know what it is. We can't see it, we can't measure it, but we know it's there. But we just can't— nobody's going to say dark matter doesn't exist now, although they tried it for years and years, but we just can't measure it. It doesn't mean it's not there. It is happening. And so when you can produce repeatable studies that something works, that warrants— as a scientist, you just go, cool, go for it. If these are trained vets, they're having positive stories, as we're going to find out the Cuba study and stuff. Like, it's anti-science to say no, don't look into it anymore. Why would you care if somebody was looking into a totally side-effect-free, wonderfully cheap-to-produce medicine? And you bloody know what the answer is. You know why the repression is there. So that was the few pages that I want to say. There is good science behind it, far more so than there is behind dry dog food, let me tell you, in support of the product. Anyway, that was my little rant out of the way, guys. Nick, you knew something about this Cuba study. What's the crack with this Cuba study?

Okay, well, the Cuba study is really, really interesting. It's a natural experiment. What happened in Cuba, kind of 2008 to 2010, kind of time— the paper came out in 2012. So what happened is, is in Cuba— and they're very sympathetic to homeopathy in Cuba, okay? They've got one of the best medical services, human medical services. This is all about a human, human medical side, okay? But bear with me, this— the figures are great. So a great medical service. They use lots of homeopathy, but they have a lot of leptospirosis among the people, okay? And so what they do, everybody gets a jab every year to help them with leptospirosis. But what happened is one year they jabbed half the population, ran out of, of, of the lepto vaccine. And so they thought, crumbs, what are we going to do? So somebody said, why don't we make a homeopathic nosode? Okay, somebody was asking about nosodes. This is A nosode is a remedy that's made up from diseased tissue. So you get somebody who's ill with leptospirosis, you take some tissue samples, some sputum and urine and what have you, and you make up a nosode. And they, they distributed this to the rest of the population. And so you had a county here who was fully vaccinated, and you had a county right next door, i.e., the same rain level, the same altitude above sea level, um, similar population distribution, age and what have you. I.e., this was a natural experiment. You had it, you had, you had a vaccinated and you had a control, which was the no-sode. Or you could say you had the no-sode, which is the study group, and you had the control, which was the vaccinated group. And what they found is that they got better results in those counties which used exclusively the no-sode above the vaccine. Oh, okay. Yeah. And this was— this wasn't done on, you know, 56 people. This was done on millions, something like 2, 2.5 million people. And these were distinct. It was— it was an accident, essentially. But it's— it's— it's like many of the historical, you know, the leaps forward in scientific history have been through fluke and accident. And this was exactly one of these things. And this is the paper that I talk to people about when they say, well, can I use no-sodes for my dog? And I say to them, if you ask a conventional vet, you will get that— they will tell you that homeopathy and no-sodes, there is no evidence whatsoever. Well, actually, that's not true because we've got the Cuban study. You can find it. It's the Cuban— if you could put 'Homeopathy Cuba 2012' into Google, you will get the study straight out. There is also— there's a guy called Isaac Golden who's done a PhD, and what he did is he looked at the using nosodes to prevent disease compared with vaccines to prevent disease, and his conclusion was that they both will, will help about 75% of, of the people who they are used on. But the big difference is that nosodes are virtually side effect free, which is more than you can say for most, if not all, vaccines. Okay, Dr. Isaac Golden.

Brent, there is one thing that I would just like to add to that. Different remedies are used in different ways, and certainly nozodes that are made in the way the Cuban study was, which was from the sputum from the diseased material, are absolutely in the face of those outbreaks of disease. Because I think it was actually around one of the hurricanes that went through Cuba at that time, it was causing a massive influx of lepto risk to the islands. That's why they ran out of the vaccine. Um, the— there is a difference between that and the remedies that we can often get in the UK, which are made from the vaccines. Okay, now great to try and reduce side effects of the vaccination, but not necessarily as effective, uh, in the face of an outbreak of disease. So be aware of that. And it's also then we're going to bring in that concept of proving, you know, how we work out what a remedy does, okay, in potency. And that's where if you give it constantly to a healthy individual you should exhibit the symptoms of that remedy. Now, if you're doing that in a nose-ode as a preventative rather than in the face of an outbreak of disease, then there is this plausible possibility that you're going to end up with a load of dogs or cats that have been given constant nose-odes that may end up with a proving of symptoms. So I think Caution how we use those nose aids. I think yes, they can be used in the face of an outbreak, but you know, on the BAHVS website we're very careful about how people perceive those because we cannot control what nose aids they're getting from the pharmacies. So always ask your homeopathic vet as to what you should be using in what circumstances. And how protective that might be.

That's—

yeah, I think that if you're going to use homeopathy, just as if you're going to use any medicine, you're best off talking to a professional, somebody. And I would say that, but you know, you, you wouldn't start taking penicillin or, or Galliprant or Previcox just on a whim. You go and see your vet because they know that the, uh, how to get the best out of those medicines. Equally, a homeopath will be able to guide you. A homeopathic vet will be able to guide you in the best use of any given homeopathic remedy, whether it's a nosode or you're treating diarrhea or skin itch or behavioral problems or whatever it might be. So I think that's a good idea. At the very least, have a chat with the homeopathic pharmacies. There are some great homeopathic pharmacies. Some of the pharmacies that I use are Helios Homeopathic Pharmacy, but also we've got Freeman's Homeopathic Pharmacy and also Ainsworth's Homeopathic Pharmacy. That's just 3 of probably a dozen good pharmacies in the UK. So at the very least, have a chat with them to see if they can guide you if there's no homeopathic vets nearby.

There's kits available online. So like, there's shops starting to specialize in this. It's becoming more popular as you turn to raw dog food. You start questioning all sorts of things. You can't help but look at everything and learn. But there's kits available. So, um, yeah, like, I, I, while the kits look cool, okay, all these little remedies, and it's even like the ailments written above it, often I see you guys when you're talking about remedies, you talk about more than one. There might be something else going on. But like, I think we miss all that, just what Brendan's after saying. We don't even know exactly the origin of these, of these, of these, of these meds, or how well they were made, or even exactly when you would use the right ones. We just read an article, are convinced by it, by whoever wrote it, and then go and buy the remedy. And so you don't think that's a good idea, just to have these kits at home and just bosh away yourself? That's not good advice. Just get the advice first.

I think, I think, I'm not sure what Brendan would say here, it's, it's how we started. Yeah, you know, when we were baby homeopaths, you just, you were given a kit of probably 8, 10 remedies. There's Arnica, there's Pulsatilla and Lycopodium, this, that, and the other. And you just said, right, take it, take some yourself if you need it. If these are the top 10 indications, give it a go. But these are medicines and they're profound. I think Kent said, please allow me to be under a blind surgeon rather than a reckless homeopath. Words to that effect. Yeah.

Okay. Is there, is there any side effects? Is there any side effects to homeopathy?

Um, physically, you have to work quite hard but they are profound, uh, they are profound remedies and they are medicines. And if you want to get the best of any medicine, be it a pharmaceutical or a homeopathic or a herbal medicine, I think at least do your reading or cut your teeth with a homeopathic or herbal or, yeah, conventional vet until you learn the parameters within which can work. I think that that would be, would be the idea, really.

Guys, I'm gonna love you. I've got a plane to go, guys.

We'll talk to you when you're at the airport, okay? Yeah, all right, fair play, man. Talk to you.

Love to, Chris, as well. Take care of yourselves, you crazy cats.

So, uh, so can homeopathic vets treat you, uh, via Zoom? Do you have to be in front Some people are saying they're struggling to find a homeopathic person to help me out. Can we— yeah, do you need to be in front of the pet too, or can you work off a vet record and say, okay, bloody stubborn viral infection, this is what I would do?

Yeah, you, you can. The ideal is to see the, see the pet because homeopathy is based on treating how the patient reacts within that disease process. So with it, as a homeopath, you wouldn't say this is a viral disease. You would say this is a patient who has a virus who is very, very feverish or particularly red. Okay, on the right-hand side, or is completely thirstless and yet they've got a fever. You know, you'd be looking for what they call strange, rare, and peculiar signs, because those strange, rare, and peculiar are giveaways to remedies that might otherwise not be very straightforward. However, you can— there is an idiot's guide to homeopathy where you go, right, if you've got bruising, you use Arnica. If you've got a really delicate cut on your eye and it's been checked by a vet, you can use Staphysagria. If you have penetrating wound, you can use leadum. So you can approach it on a painting-by-numbers kind of way. And just looking at the time, we've got maybe 10 or so minutes. I'm just— let me just give you some literature because people might— so there's a few. There's some of the classics. Is one here, this is by Chris Day. He taught me 25 years ago. It's a wonderful book. It's lots of information there. Very, very— it's concise but very useful. Um, again, a wonderful friend of mine, Lisa Hansen— oh yeah, has written this, and she talks about no-sodes, and she talks about feeding, and she talks about neutering. So if you, if you, if you're new to the holistic world you'll find this a very, very, very useful book. That's Lise, L-I-S-E. She's Norwegian, wonderful woman.

Yeah.

Um, one of the best books on homeopathy, I think, for kind of a deep dive, is by my friend Don Hamilton. He used to come over and lecture when we had conferences. This is my very tatty copy, seen a lot of miles.

Yeah.

Homeopathic Care for Cats and Dogs. If you just go to to Amazon and look at Don Hamilton. It's a great— it's a really great introduction, and he will talk to you about the history, and he'll talk to you about what is homeopathy and how do they make homeopathic remedies, for example. And he does quite a lot of work on vaccination. He's very anti-vaccination, but he justifies his position, which is great.

Yeah.

And finally, if you've got horses, this— you've got— there is this book by George MacLeod. He was kind of The grandfather of homeopathy, even before Chris Day. And if you notice this one, I, I've revised and updated this wonderful book by George MacLeod. And, uh, so that's an extreme—

oh, I didn't know, I didn't know. Of course it is, Nick, you've had a handle. I, uh, I didn't know you did that, Nick. Very good. So you, you went through it and freshened it up a bit?

I freshened it up, yeah. Like the master, you know, he wrote it 50 years ago, so I went through and freshened up. And there's another book, if you've got horses, there's a wonderful book by Tim Cousens, Cousins with a Z, C-O-U-Z-E-N-S. And he's written kind of the Bible, even more comprehensive than the George McLeod book that I helped him with, by Tim Cousens. It's called Homeopathy for Horses. Wonderful book, really, really useful to have if you've got horses.

Yeah.

So I was going to give you some examples of using homeopathy if that works for you. It's always nice to kind of see these things in action. And when I was thinking about this this afternoon, the case that really came to mind was my son when he was about— who's a human last time I looked, although he doesn't act it always— he, when he was 3 months old, he was getting colic as babies do, but he was getting colic. And this is a good example of it's not just a disease, it's not just a label that you treat. You go the further, the more you can, can make it typical of or recognize what is typical for that particular patient, the better results you'll get. So Arthur was getting colic. Yeah, okay, big deal. What do you use for colic? But he was getting colic at about between 6:30 and 7:30 every evening. Regular as clockwork. And on about the second or the third evening with him wailing because— and burping and everything else— it suddenly struck me, he's Lycopodium. Because Lycopodium has an aggravation from 5 to 7 PM. Okay, so it's a very digestive remedy. Okay, so that gets you in the broad picture for using a digestive. How do you isolate it down? Of all the remedies, it's one of the strongest when you have an aggravation, i.e., things happen between 5 and 7 PM. He had 2 doses of Lycopodium, and he has never had colic for the rest of his life. Yeah, so he was a child, colic, colic, colic, colic for, you know, several days, and then zero. And babies don't really do that. They will drag, you know, slowly Yeah, and then they'll grow out of it as they get a little bit bigger, or, you know, gut function improves, or, you know, whatever it might be. I think that's pretty stark. Another really lovely example is when we've— when back in the old days I would vaccinate horses, okay, and we used to vaccinate them in the neck. I do nowadays— I did— I would if I did. I don't see horses very often now, and I definitely don't vaccinate them. We vaccinate them in the chest, but in the old days you'd vaccinate them in the neck, or some other vet had vaccinated them in the neck. And what we used to do is we used to use the remedy derived from the flu and tetanus vaccine, and we'd give it to the horse before they were vaccinated in the neck. Because what happens if you're vaccinated in the neck? You can no longer go down to graze, and being a grazing animal, that's a really big deal. And so they would go off their food for several days after the vaccination. We would give them the flu, tet vaccine. It's called a tautode actually, but it's essentially— it's noted, it's— we make a remedy from the vaccine, and lo and behold, they don't get half as much impact from the vaccine. Yeah, so horse has had a problem for several years running without the remedy. You give the remedy, horse massively improved, if not no problem whatsoever. It's marvelous, it's really good. And there are lots of, lots of doggy examples that we can use for that. For example, whenever I see a dog with a mild mast cell tumor, I use a remedy that I took from a Staffordshire Bull Terrier about 20 years ago. We took this, the, the, the, the tumor off the dog and we sent it to the homeopathic pharmacy. They made up a remedy from the, from the diseased tissue, and I use that, and I've had great results. I don't— I cannot cure everything. You're foolish to say I'm really, really happy with my results and I don't use, you know, Massivet or any of these licensed products, which you do need to talk to your vet about. Yeah, so it's, uh, homeopathy, it's a very interesting subject, and, and I think it's really— don't dismiss it would be my advice, would, would be to, you know, if you want to start somewhere gentle Start with the Lisa Hansen book. You'd find that a great place to start into things. She talks about lots of things in both dogs and cats, so it's quite an easy way to go in. Any thoughts, Conor? Because you're new to the homeopathic thing. I've been very new in the ocean for a very long time, so I'm just—

I'm dying to read up about it. And it's kind of like— it feels to me kind of like the way probiotics it's like a huge, huge subject and I want to know everything about it. And the good thing, I suppose, is there's not a whole lot of studies. So, but I think what I'll do is I'll start with one of those books and I'll just start kind of dipping my toe. But generally, if there was ever an issue with anybody near and dear to me, I would just talk to somebody that knows lots about it. So you've already done all the work. So this feels to me like a subject that I'm not sure I'm ever going to catapult myself into, but I was going to get myself a kit and I was going to do a little bit of reading and just start firing it into the dog as I saw fit. And I am put off by that. It's interesting that you're, you're a little bit reluctant about the cancer treatment. You can't even talk about cancer these days, people get their knickers in a twist. You're not allowed to say the big C, and whether it's cancer or COVID. But, um, so, but it's interesting, this, uh, as I skipped over this little paragraph because I didn't want to get into it, but it said, uh, nobody batted an eyelid when Dr. Alan Rose, as worldwide vice president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline, now the boss man. Britain's biggest drug company admitted this to the science editor of The Independent, that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them. People are staggered by that. Drugs for cancer are— this is out of the words out of his mouth in The Independent 5 years ago— drugs for cancer are only effective in a quarter of patients. 75% of the time, those drugs won't work to fix whatever it was destined to fix. That's acceptable failure rate, 75%. So it's nearly— if you think your treatment is working to some degree, well, some degree is, is nearly all we can hope for in some efforts. Is there, is there a, is there a possibility that we can marry the two approaches, that you can take a little from column A and a little from column B, a little homeopathy along with conventional meds? Is there any issue to do, to mess around that way?

I'm not sure about homeopathy with conventional medicine. You know, it's very difficult. To talk about cancer and conventional medicine, homeopathy, so I'm not really going to go there. Other disease— yes, in other diseases, I would say that you're better off using homeopathy either on its own or with herbs and supplements and food.

Okay.

Because you, you can— steroids, for example, are well, well known to really dull the effects of of homeopathic remedies. Saying that, nothing— there's, there's a classic quote which is, nothing stands in the way of a well-chosen remedy.

Yeah, yeah.

But if your dog's on steroids and you've chosen an okay remedy, you'll get a lot more bang for your buck if the dog wasn't on steroids.

Interesting.

So again, if, if, if you, if you are juggling between pharmaceuticals and homeopathics, I think you need to talk to qualified homeopathic vet, not even talking to the pharmacy. You need to talk to a qualified homeopathic vet for appropriate guidance, really.

There was— coming back to the dilution thing, people get upset about how diluted it is. And do you remember, Nick, we were in the car in Finland after that glorious kind of trip up north, and Anne Heimborgman was telling us about— she's got these sniffer dogs, they do all sorts of things— and she said well, my sniffer dogs can sniff out the difference between a homeopathic remedy and just pure distilled water. So people are trying to say you're just buying water. Well, then dogs shouldn't be able to detect. And these are these trials. The people doing these trials are experts at making sure that, like, you haven't left the scent on the wrong cone or whatever the dog's trying to detect. They're trying to train these dogs to find COVID, as she did. She was the first person to do it in Europe. But it wasn't interesting that she said they could detect the difference in homeopathic remedies. That for me tells me all I need to know. In a blind test where the things are covered, that's the homeopath. What is, what is the dog smelling? We haven't a clue, but they're detecting something. So to say it's distilled water is utter nonsense because the dog is detecting it. That wasn't published yet, so I really hope they publish that. But like, isn't it funny? So all this kind of dark art bullshit— it was Anna Heimborg that picked me up in it, Nick. We were sitting out on her little veranda, her little porch, at about 2 o'clock in the morning, I would say. And we were talking about all sorts of wonderful scientific stuff, looking at the biggest sky ever, like, you know, Finland, not a middle of the Baltic Sea, it was just glorious. And we're talking about all this, best conversation ever. And then astrology came up and I poo-pooed it and I just said, oh, shit. And she just shot me such a stern look. And this is like, you know, virtually one of my gods. It's like she's the biggest person I could possibly imagine. I could sit there and be like me sitting beside Isaac Newton if that was your big guy. And she turns around, she kind of goes, I am disappointed. Conor. And I went, oh shit. And she— and I knew straight away I'd made a mistake. I wasn't quite sure what. And she goes, what do you know about astrology? And I said, well, I know enough to think it's nonsense. It's been disproven by a lot of people. She goes, disproven by who? She goes, homeopathy is disproven by mainstream, but that doesn't mean anything at all. And I knew that was true, and I thought, oh, okay. And she goes, you know that everything mates at the same time of the year, at certain lunar cycles the sea just fills up with semen? You know, this is all happening at the same time. You know that it has behavioral effects in humans. And then I started Googling studies before I met these two behaviorists yesterday, because I said this to her and she was— it tweaked her interest. And she said, is there any studies of like human babies born at certain times? I thought, oh yeah, is there? And there is. Depending on the season you're born, it changes the reaction times and aggression in babies, in 18-month-old babies. And that was just the first study that popped up. And I thought, oh my God, when you're born at certain times of the year has an effect because you're made of water, you know, gravitational pull of the moon changes a certain way. So you might be born more susceptible at certain times of year to certain things. I'm open to the idea. And so she shot me down, and it's the last time I'll ever poo-poo anybody if they talk about bloody ghosts or anything. I'll go, yeah, maybe if that's, that's your thing. And, uh, but that's skepticism. Skepticism is like, maybe, yeah, okay, I'm not sure, I haven't really looked into it. If you could, can you show me a few bits to convince me? A cynic is what the veterinary industry is doing to us non-vets, where we are saying fresh food makes a lot of sense to me, biologically appropriate for the animal, and their cynicism, which is bullshit. I'm not listening to any of your stuff. And no matter how much science you bring to this scientist, they won't listen to it because they can't bring themselves to change their opinion. That's cynicism, and you'll never change it. It's an anti-science position, although they pretend they're evidence-based. And so that was the last time I was going to be told off. I was like, oh my God, So like when you ask me what's my position on homeopathy, I'm totally open to it and I've seen it working. And you and Brad are the best vets I know. And if you guys have been practicing and 50 others in the UK, who am I to— like, who is any other vet to tell you what success you've had with a remedy that they've never tried? I mean, it's nonsensical that people would back scientists that speak like that. So that was really my own— there's some really heavy questions in that. There's people here that know an an awful lot about homeopathy. Can I reach out one, Nick? Although it is— yeah, go for it.

Let's have another 5 minutes. Yeah, this is just important stuff.

The questions are just, uh, are way ahead of where I am anyway. It says, uh, this is Penny, she asked it twice: is there a link between homeopathy and the body being in a homeostatic balanced state for efficacy? Does that make sense to you? Especially interested in things to gut biome.

Yeah, that was Jay— that was, uh, Penny, wasn't it? Yeah, I saw it.

Yeah.

Okay. So homeostasis is kind of the old way of saying that the body is in balance. We've kind of moved on from homeostasis because the body is not static. Stasis implies a fixed point, but actually the body oscillates within parameters. Not too hot, not too cold, not too inflamed, not too— lack of inflammation. So it just— it's like a goldfish within a bowl. If you take the goldfish out of the bowl, it dies, but within the bowl, absolutely great. So that would be my first thought. And homeopathy, the word itself means homeopathy, same disease. And so what you're trying to do is to say the body is in dis-ease, the, the ease, then they are out of the goldfish bowl. How can we find a way of directing the vital energy they talk about back into that homeostatic zone? And I think that's how homeopathy works. It doesn't actually take you from flapping about by the goldfish bowl. It, it it directs you. It puts a big signpost saying, if you— if you, Nemo, if you swim this way, you will get back into the ocean or the goldfish bowl. Okay, so that's, that's how I see it. It doesn't take you there, it gives you a signpost. And if your body has enough energy to sort itself out— sort itself out, yeah. So that is to say, if you— if you're on your deathbed, homeopathy may not be appropriate to you. There's a famous old story about one of the old homeopaths, you know, homeopathy's been going 200 years, so 100 years ago or so. And phosphorus is renowned for, you know, giving a jolt of energy to people even if they're in a really bad way. And the famous homeopathic doctor came into the room and gave a dose of high-potency phosphorus for us, and the patient promptly died. Everyone in the room turned around, and the homeopathic doctor said, right remedy, wrong potency.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. Sorry, I was just gonna say, I told you it works. It just didn't work the right way. Yeah, yeah.

And there's another lovely story about a woman who had a very old— this is— I heard this story 20 years ago, back in the day, and she had had, uh, headaches ever since she received her, her smallpox jab when she was a kid. Headaches, migraines, all her life. And so she went to see a homeopath when she was in her 70s, and the homeopath said, when did this all start? She said, you wouldn't believe it, but ever since the smallpox. So the, uh, the homeopath gave her— what do you think he— the homeopath gave her? Gave her a little dose of smallpox. Lo and behold, she lived the rest of her life without any— without any—

yeah. One last thing. Matt Berry here. Uh, Jane Eastwood, to be honest, I thought it was a hippie fad until I was 47 and I walked into a holistic vet with my dog. 10 days later, my mind was clean from forever. I think that kind of sums it up. It's kind of like, suck it and see. We were all like that about a lot of things, and then you give it a go and say, shit, this works. You know, maybe I have been conned. Maybe this is quite an effective, very simple, very cheap to produce treatment that can work. And so the repression is real. The repression of fresh food is real. The repression of easing off the need for too many vaccinations is a real concept. Too much conventional medicine is going into our bodies because because that is the most profitable thing and treating symptoms is way better than producing cures and that's a fact and we don't want to think that that sort of darkness is going on but it doesn't have to be bloody, it doesn't have to be kind of lizard people to understand that no, it's just a money-driven thing and these companies, you don't have to love them, hate them, you know, they're just predators and that's just the way it is, you know, and so I kind of see it, I see the repression for what it is And once again, shame on The Guardian, on all papers like that, that lead the charge and promote the bullshit from the 1 or 2 or 3 nutjobs that call themselves evidence-based scientists and want to repress and restrict and actually punish and dismiss vets that promote this treatment. It's just like, what sort of anti-science statement is that? It really bothers me. I better go out and give a hand here because I can hear a baby crying and then there's a baby I'm gonna be getting it from both sides. So that was interesting, Nick. I could have gone on another hour about that, and there's loads of questions there that are really on point. So we'll probably come back to this. Let's just do some of those in the FAQs, okay? Because there's some really clued-in people there. And so that's next time we do FAQs. What day is it now? It's gonna be another 3 shows, then we'll do— we'll cover those questions there, guys. And so thanks very much for coming, everybody. Patreon.com/warpetmedics would normally be scrolling across the bottom. If you can help us out, the price of a cup of tea, a cup of coffee, very much appreciated. Thanks for all your support on that. And Nick and I will be back next week, possibly Bren, possibly not, and we will have another wonderful subject for you. Just, we'll have a look at Patreon and see what's next on the list.

Maestro, what shall we do? Should we do fiber? We've got 7 days to do a bit of reading. Should we do fiber?

Fibers, big one, soluble fiber and crude fiber. Yeah, why not? Fiber and diarrhea and constipation, there's 3 things. Okay, cool, sounds good. All right, guys.

All right, so good. Thank everybody. I'm gonna hit the button now. Thank you very, very much. Before he disappears, thank you guys. See you in 7 days.

Can't